RACHEL WEAVER IS eighteen. She lived with her boyfriend, Josh, in a large, plain ranch house in northwest Montana. I sat at her kitchen table, drinking her apple juice and eating from a jar of Certs mints, while Josh lifted weights in the spare bedroom.
Rachel said, “The gun I really fell in love with is the .45 70. I’m not even sure who makes it. It’s a lever action. It’s not like it’s a big machine gun. It’s not a hard kick. It’s a . . . whoa . . . it lugs you back.”
When she said “whoa,” she slid her shoulder back as if she was dancing.
“Do you want to try it out?” she said.
“OK,” I said.
Rachel disappeared into the back room and she returned holding two semiautomatic rifles.
“This is the .45 70,” she said. “And this one is an AR15. Honey . . . ?”
“Yeah?” called Josh.
“Will you get the mini .14?”
“OK!” he yelled.
Josh appeared holding a silver revolver. They laid the guns out on the kitchen table—a mini cache, almost like a photograph of a police seizure—and loaded them one by one.
“How did you two meet?” I asked them.
“High school,” said Rachel.
“She didn’t like me in high school,” said Josh.
“What a dork,” said Rachel.
“Ha,” said Josh.
“He was a jock,” said Rachel. “Mr. Tm a Stud.’ ” She rolled her eyes. “I was always, ‘OK, whatever . . .’ ”
But now they were engaged to be married.
“Josh is one of the boys that your mom says not to go around with,” said Rachel.
WE PUT ON OUR coats and our baseball caps and we headed out into the fields behind Rachel’s house. Before we started, Rachel wanted to give me a talk about the basics of sensible shooting, but Josh just shoved a loaded rifle into my hands.
And then, once Rachel’s four horses had been shooed to a safe distance, and I had propped the gun onto my shoulder: Bam!
“Look at him!” laughed Josh. “He’s grinning all over his face!” Josh was delighted. “You see that?” he said. “Big smile.”
This was true.
Bam! I went. Bam! And then: Bam bam bam bam!
“Now I understand why you people don’t want to give up your guns!” I yelled.
“Once you’ve fired your first shot,” said Josh, “there’s no going back.”
Bam bam! I tried out a fancy maneuver. Bam bam! . . . Bam!
“Careful, Jon,” said Rachel. “You’re starting to look a little radical!”
“Ha!” I said.
“You’ve crossed over now,” said Josh.
It was Josh’s turn to shoot, so Rachel and I sheltered from the snow in the woodshed.
“You know,” she said, “I don’t see guns as a big political thing.”
“Why not?” I asked her.
“Well,” she replied. “The reason—”
Bam! went Josh. Bam bam bam! Bam!
“The reason—” said Rachel again.
Bam! Bam! Josh continued shooting into nothing.
“Come on,” said Rachel, impatiently. We waited for Josh to stop, which he finally did in order to reload.
“OK,” said Rachel. “The reason why I don’t see it as a big political thing is because even if I had my rifles it’s not going to do me any good if the government wants to wipe me out. They can just fly over in a helicopter and drop a firebomb.”
We both involuntarily looked up to the sky.
“Trying to go up against the government?” said Rachel. “That’s just . . .”
She trailed off. Then she added, wistfully, “Unless the whole country did it.” She laughed. “Now that would be different, I guess.”
She turned to Josh.
“Honey?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got about five minutes. Then I’ve really got to get into town.”
“OK,” said Josh.
We shot some more. Rachel found some tin cans. She said that shooting into nothing was pointless. She shot three times and hit the tin cans twice. Then she looked at her watch.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Honey . . . ?”
“I’m going to shoot these last five,” said Josh.
“OK,” sighed Rachel.
“I’m going to shoot these five,” repeated Josh, thinly.
“Why?”
“Because I want to,” snapped Josh.
“Watch the horses, honey,” said Rachel. “They’re—”
BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!
But Josh had finished it. He finished it in a manner I would have called testy had guns not been involved—but guns were involved so I will call it frenzied—by pumping his pistol senselessly and abruptly into the ground.
Rachel stared daggers at Josh.
“Easy as that,” he said, icily.
“You enjoy just wasting bullets?”
“Yes,” said Josh.
We wandered back to the house. Sensible, safety-conscious Rachel led the way, dumb gung-ho me and even dumber gung-ho Josh followed. I had never seen a domestic quarrel punctuated by gunfire before, and it had startled me into an awkward silence. Rachel was silently furious with Josh for behaving like a gun-toting idiot in front of a journalist. Josh was silently seething for his own unfathomable reasons. Nobody said anything.
WHEN RACHEL WAS two years old, in the early 1980s, her parents, Randy and Vicki Weaver, took her from the city to live on top of a mountain in Idaho. Her father, an ex-Green Beret in the U.S. Special Forces, built them a plywood cabin, 25 foot by 32 foot, 4,000 feet up in the Selkirk Mountains, at the top of Farnsworth Road overlooking Ruby Creek, among the bears and the mountain lions.
There was Rachel, her parents, her nine-year-old sister, Sara, their seven-year-old brother, Sammy, and some dogs and chickens. Later on Vicki would give birth to baby Elisheba up there.
If you can’t opt out on top of a mountain in Idaho, her parents figured, you can’t opt out anywhere. If the government won’t leave you alone there, where can you be left alone?
“They just wanted to get away,” said Rachel, “away from the bad things they show on TV.”
The children were homeschooled. Rachel’s parents believed that the world was being secretly ruled by a clique of primarily Zionist international bankers, global elitists who wanted to establish a genocidal New World Order and implant microchips bearing the mark of Satan into everyone’s forehead. But they had no intention of doing anything about it. The international bankers were a long way off.
They were pioneers back in 1982. Nowadays many people, including Omar Bakri and his friends, believe that the New World Order, the international bankers, are secretly ruling the world from a room somewhere. But Randy and Vicki were among the first. They hammered a sign outside their cabin that read: STOP THE NEW WORLD ORDER.
Some of the things they believed up there might seem crazy, but they were a long way off.
RACHEL POURED ME some more apple juice and gave me some more Certs mints to eat while she told me about her early memories of life in that cabin.
“There are just so many things that people don’t understand,” she said. “When I was little I would go out and watch a wasp dig a hole in the ground for hours. Then I’d follow him and he’d go and paralyze a worm or a cricket and he’d drag it into his hole and he’d lay an egg and the egg would feed on it and it would hatch and crawl out of the ground. Little things that nobody would ever notice. But I noticed.”
She passed me some strawberry Twizzlers.
“The media said we were crazy up there and had landmines everywhere and all we cared about was guns. I do like guns. I still do. I did then. But it’s not weird or crazy.”
Rachel showed me photographs of her family. Sammy looked about ten, a little skinny blond-haired boy, but he actually was fourteen when the photograph was taken.
“What are your early memories of Sammy?” I asked her.
“That would have to be me being called a tagalong.” Rachel smiled. “Sara and Sammy were closer in age. They went hiking. They had horses. They’d go and hang out in a tree fort. I was just tripping and falling. So I’d have to pacify myself by playing with lizards and bugs. I remember the day before everything happened, Sammy went down to collect the seeds from his radish plants, and I followed him down to watch him and talk to him, and he was all, ‘Leave me alone. Quit following me.’ And I went behind this blown-over tree and I was sitting there crying and he came over and apologized to me and told me he loved me, and I remember that because he’d never said anything like that to me before.”
She showed me more photographs. Her father, Randy, was dressed in a biker jacket, the big sky behind him.
Her mother, Vicki, looked like a Bible scholar.
Rachel and Sara looked like typical American children, pretty, long black hair.
Elisheba was just a baby.
Rachel picked up the photograph of her mother.
“She was dainty,” she said. “Petite, very feminine, never burped in front of anybody. Just wonderful. Dad was always the final yes or no, but Mom was always very persuasive. She was the brains, and she just let him think he was running the show. Dad probably still doesn’t know it.” She laughed. “When you see him you’d better not tell him that I told you that.”
IT WAS VICKI’S idea to move to the cabin. As much as Randy shared his wife’s beliefs about how the separatist Weavers needed to isolate themselves from the tyranny of the impending world government and so on, Randy liked to cut loose once in a while and go drinking in populated areas.
Unfortunately, one of the populated areas he chose was the nearby Aryan Nations, a militant neo-Nazi community and gathering place for skinheads and racists. They wore their hearts on their sleeves, in the form of swastika armbands.
Aryan Nations holds a big summer camp every year, and Randy visited four years running, sometimes taking the children along. He says now that he would invariably get into fights with the neo-Nazis about their beliefs. (He says their disagreement centered on who, exactly, constituted the secret clique of global elitists who were implementing a planetary takeover. The neo-Nazis blamed the Jews exclusively, whereas Randy felt that focusing antipathy onto a single race was a mistake. He didn’t consider himself to be a white supremacist. He was a separatist. This may sound pedantic, but it wasn’t pedantic to him. But, still, he liked the neo-Nazis as people, and he thought their countryside and picnic areas were nice.)
Randy was finally kicked out of the place for smuggling in a six-pack of beer. Aryan Nations is terribly intolerant, about beer drinking too.
But he did make friends there. One of his friends was Gus Magisano. Gus asked Randy to rob banks with him, and hoard machine guns. Gus told Randy that the New World Order, the secret clique of international bankers, could be overthrown only with ordered violence. Randy told Gus that he wasn’t interested.
One day Gus asked Randy to sell him two sawed-off shotguns. Randy said OK. He asked Gus where he wanted them sawed. Gus pointed to a spot on the barrel that was a quarter of an inch outside the legal limit. Randy sawed away.
Gus wasn’t his real name, of course. He was an undercover informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The plan was to entice Randy into sawing off the shotguns below the legal limit, and then offer him a deal. He could either become a government informant and spy on Aryan Nations, or he could go to jail for illegal gunrunning.
“I don’t understand it,” said Rachel. “We were just good people who didn’t even have any intention of doing anything wrong. I totally don’t understand why they even came to my dad to ask him to saw off shotguns. It makes no sense to me. It just blows my mind that they’d even care.”
For the government, though, Randy had the makings of a perfect informant—a slightly crazy person who was friends with far crazier people, a family man with bad finances. How could he turn them down?
He didn’t just turn them down, he made a great big burlesque show of turning them down.
“Hey, Vicki!” he yelled. “Come out here. Take a look at these guys! Guess what they just asked me to do! Write down their names.” And so on.
Six months later, Randy was indicted on the shotgun charge. In a preliminary hearing, the magistrate told Randy that he’d lose the cabin if he lost the case. Randy and Vicki considered themselves to be in a no-win situation. They would lose the cabin if they failed to appear, but they were bound to lose the case, so they would lose the cabin even if they did appear. They decided not to show up in court anymore. They buried their heads in the sand. A young family friend, Kevin Harris, moved in with them. The family took to carrying guns at all times. They became increasingly convinced that the New World Order was watching them from the bushes.
They discovered that they were, in fact, being watched from the bushes. They found a surveillance camera and tore it down. Randy let it be known that he would not be taken off the mountain alive, although most of the people who knew him considered these words to be just bravado. Vicki gave birth to Elisheba.
And then, one day in August, it all began.
“I REMEMBER THE first part,” said Rachel. “I was out on the back porch with Mom and my little sister Elisheba who was at that time ten months old. Sara came through the house and said the dogs were going crazy, and Kevin and Sammy were going out to see what it was.”
Sammy grabbed his gun. Rachel grabbed Elisheba and a mini .14. She tagged along as far as the front of the cabin.
“I had only ever had a glimpse of a mountain lion. I loved mountain lions. The dogs didn’t usually go crazy wild when people came up. So I was hoping I’d see a bear or something. Then I remember hearing gunshots.”
This was August 21, 1992. What had happened was this: Three U.S. marshals had been staking out the cabin for weeks, hoping to arrest Randy for failure to appear on the shotgun charge. That morning they got too close to the cabin door. Striker the Labrador began barking and running after them. Sammy and Kevin followed the dog down the hill. Suddenly, an agent jumped out from the bushes in jungle camouflage and shot Striker in the back.
Sammy yelled, “You killed my dog, you son of a bitch!”
He fired two random shots, which hit nobody. He was 4 foot 11 inches tall, and his voice hadn’t broken. The U.S. marshals then opened fire, nearly blowing off Sammy’s arm.
Sammy yelled, “Dad! I’m coming home, Dad!”
He turned around to run back to his father, but the U.S. marshals shot him dead in the back.
Kevin Harris opened fire. The marshals shot back and one of them was killed, either by Kevin or by friendly fire, as they call it.
“We were all standing on that rock that overlooks our driveway,” said Rachel. “Mom and Sara and Dad and I. Kevin came running up the hill and said that Sammy had been shot and he was dead. And it was just . . . we just let out a cry and broke down. Dad fired Mom’s .223 into the air. Full clip. And Mom asked Kevin if he was sure, and he said, yeah.”
For Randy and Vicki, the responsibility for Sammy’s death lay not with the U.S. marshals, not with the government, but with the New World Order, the Secret Rulers of the World, the clique of world bankers and globalist CEOs and media moguls who meet in secret rooms to plot the carve-up of the planet.
Vicki Weaver wrote in her diary that night that Striker and Sammy had been killed while chasing the “servants of the New World Order” down Farnsworth Road.
The U.S. marshals called for backup, and an army of four hundred troops was dispatched within the next twenty-four hours to surround the cabin and the nearby roads and the meadow below. There were U.S. marshals and FBI snipers in gas masks and face paint and camouflage, local police, state police, the BATF, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Border Patrol, Highway Patrol from four states, city police, and the Forestry Service. They had tanks and armored personnel carriers.
The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team took control. They sealed off an area of twenty square miles at a cost of a million dollars a day. More federal troops were flown in by helicopter. They built a new road up the mountain for the tanks. Martial law was declared by the state governor, who called the Weaver cabin an “extreme emergency and disaster area.”
Two local journalists reported seeing the FBI load fuel into cylinders and load the cylinders into a helicopter, which they flew above the cabin. Perhaps they intended to firebomb the family to eliminate the witnesses (Randy, Rachel, Sara, Vicki, Kevin, and Elisheba). It is a matter of debate. Whatever, the FBI saw that the journalists had witnessed the maneuver and the helicopter landed again.
This military operation was undertaken with such stealth, such silence, that—besides from hearing a few sirens down in the valley—the Weaver family had no idea that they were now surrounded.
The neighbors came out of their houses and saw the army roll past them up the hill. They scribbled messages onto placards and held them up at the troops. The placards read:
Death to the New World Order!
New World Order Burn in Hell!
The morning after Sammy’s death, Randy wanted to see his son’s body one last time (they had carried him from the road and wrapped him in blankets and placed him in the toolshed) so he opened the cabin door and looked around the hillside and saw nothing (the snipers being heavily camouflaged).
He walked the few yards to the shed. As he put his hand on the latch, an FBI sniper called Lon Horiuchi yelled, “Freeze, Weaver!” and then he shot Randy in the arm.
Rachel saw this as she stood at the cabin door with her mother, Vicki, who held the baby, Elisheba, in her arms.
“You bastards!” yelled Vicki.
Then the sniper shot Vicki through the face.
The bullet went right through Vicki’s head, taking with it fragments of her skull, which embedded themselves in Kevin’s arm and rib cage and lungs. Vicki dropped dead to the floor at Rachel’s feet, with Elisheba underneath her. Randy ran back to the cabin.
“Dad picked Elisheba up off from underneath Mom and handed her to me,” said Rachel. “She had blood and stuff all over her head and we were afraid she’d been shot too, but she was OK. It was just Mom’s blood. Dad brought Mom in and put her on the kitchen floor. That’s when we drew the curtains around all the windows and shut the door, obviously, and we didn’t come out after that.
“I remember feeding Elisheba a whole box of sweets so she wouldn’t cry, poor girl.
“I remember having to crawl through Mom’s blood every time I needed to go into the kitchen to get food.
“I don’t think of it as this day or that day after that. I just remember it as one long terrible day.”
THE MILITARY SET up base camp a few hundred yards down the mountain. The rumor went that some army person hammered a sign into the ground outside the tents calling their temporary barracks “Camp Vicki.”
“I remember hearing people underneath the house rustling through our stuff,” said Rachel. “I remember the floodlights coming in through the cracks in the curtains and hearing their stupid half-tracks rolling over our stuff in the yard.”
Rachel told me this as we sat at her kitchen table. There are very few ornaments in her house. Where you might have a painting, binoculars hang from a nail in the wall next to the front window. (Rachel told me they were there for birdwatching, but during our time together a car happened to stop on the road near the front of her long driveway and she grabbed the binoculars and peered through them and only sat down again once it had driven away.)
“The tanks crunched our generator,” said Rachel, “rolled over our outhouse. Not to mention, after they shot our dog and my brother, they ran over the dog.”
Rachel said, “Just sick.”
She said, “Every day they would shout at us through some bullhorn. They’d yell, ‘Vicki! Vicki! Tell Randy to pick up the phone. Vicki! We’re having blueberry pancakes for breakfast. What are you having for breakfast?’ And Dad would scream out, ‘You sons of bitches, you shot her! You know she’s dead!’ And they’d never answer us. I know they could hear us through the walls. These were just plywood walls. I remember being really mad at them for acting like nothing was wrong.”
The spinning had begun straightaway. The FBI said that Randy himself might have shot Sammy in the back. They said the marshals had been ambushed, that they were pinned down and had not returned fire. They said that Randy was wanted for bank robberies, that he was a white supremacist, that the Weavers lived in a “mountain fortress,” and then “a bunker,” and “a stronghold protected by a cache of fifteen weapons and ammunition capable of piercing armored personnel carriers.”
They said that the two shotguns Randy sold the undercover informant were “the chosen weapons of drug dealers and terrorists.”
Most of this was unnecessary, of course. The two crucial words were “white supremacist.” That did it. Randy was henceforth referred to in all media as “white supremacist Randy Weaver.”
I dug out a tape of a talk show aired at the time, Politically Incorrect from New York, in which Randy’s case was discussed by the comedian Bill Maher, Nadine Strossen of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Garry Marshall, the creator of Mork and Mindy and Pretty Woman.
BILL MAHER: He was in Aryan Nations. Come on. Oh, boo hoo!
NADINE STROSSEN: Belonging to Aryan Nations is not a crime. That’s his right.
GARRY MARSHALL: In my neighborhood if a guy puts swastikas on his kids, I would be a little suspicious. I wouldn’t say: “Come on over! We’ll have some fruit!”
AUDIENCE: (Big laugh.)
BILL MAHER: They shot the dog in the back. Can you believe that, Garry? Oh, man, that’s a Canine American! He has his rights!
AUDIENCE: (Laugh.)
GARRY MARSHALL: That was the worst thing that happened!
AUDIENCE: (Laugh.)
NADINE STROSSEN: He wasn’t causing any danger to anyone.
BILL MAHER: If you’re bringing up your kids in Aryan Nations you are causing danger because you’re spawning hate in America.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
The white supremacist angle was clearly working.
I LEFT RACHEL that evening. Before I got into my car, she told me I should be careful not to over-romanticize her family. She said that the people who did not call them white supremacists tended to go on about fields of cotton and running through cornfields.
“Running through cornfields?” I asked.
“A friend of my dad,” she said, “started writing a book about what happened, and Dad was reading the first chapter, which was all about him as a boy running through cornfields. And Dad said, ‘What a bunch of bullshit.’ He never ran through cornfields. But Dad’s friend likes to write and he wanted to make it great.”
Rachel laughed.
“Running through cornfields,” she said.
I LEFT RACHEL’S house and drove two hundred miles—through Missoula, near where the movie stars live (Meg Ryan, Peter Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, etc.), and into Idaho, through the Bitterroot Mountains, past a sign that reads WINDING ROAD NEXT 77 MILES—and I stopped twelve miles past Kamiah, where Jack McLamb lives.
Jack McLamb lives in a trailer home in a small Christian community called Doves of the Valley. He looks like a friendly church minister, with a bouffant of white hair. In fact he is an ex-policeman, retired from the force after he created an organization called Police Against the New World Order.
I asked Jack how he first heard of Randy Weaver.
“They were calling him a neo-Nazi on the radio,” he said, “an anti-Semitic hatemonger, a violent radical, any nasty name you can think about. You’re the scum of the earth and they have a right to kill you, see?”
“I guess that the worst thing you can be called is an anti-Semite,” I said.
“Boy,” said Jack, “the worst thing. Not racist. Not homophobe. Anti-Semite. There’s such a power there. Boy. You get labeled an anti-Semite, you’re in big trouble. The media picked it up, of course, and used those words. They needed to demonize these people in case it ever got to court. They knew they were in big trouble. I mean, oh my goodness, talk about jury appeal. When you machine-gun a little boy in the back and shoot a mother holding a baby in the head, you’ve got yourself some jury appeal.”
Jack said, “Anti-Semite. That’s the first thing they hit you with when you start to investigate the New World Order. I’m learning this myself. I’ve been labeled an anti-Semite just because I’m speaking out against this damnable world system.”
“Who is calling you an anti-Semite?” I asked.
“The Anti-Defamation League out of New York,” said Jack. He quickly added, “It isn’t true, of course. I am an honorary member of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms.” Jack paused. “Some people think this is a Jewish conspiracy, some think it’s a Catholic conspiracy, some people think it’s a Masonic conspiracy. But I know what it really is.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It is a Satanic globalist conspiracy,” said Jack.
I WAS SURPRISED to hear from Jack that the first thing Randy Weaver yelled through the cabin walls at him, the very first thing he yelled to the outside world, having been under siege for a week, was not “They killed Vicki! They killed my bride!” (That was the second thing he yelled.) It was not “I’ve been shot too!” (That was the third thing he yelled.) The first thing he yelled was, “Why is the radio calling me a white supremacist when those are not my views?”
Jack said to me, “The saddest days of my life were spent on the top of that mountain. It just broke my heart.”
It was a warm evening, and so we sat outside.
“You know why they shot Vicki Weaver?” said Jack. “They knew Vicki was the strongest member of the family. This is what you learn in military training. Take out the head. This was a family. But they were treating them just as a military target. I get tears in my eyes thinking about it.”
“How did you end up being there?” I asked Jack.
“OK,” he said. “I was living in Arizona at the time, and Colonel Bo Gritz came into town campaigning for the presidency of the United States. Colonel Bo Gritz is the most decorated Green Beret in the U.S. Army. Movies have been made about his exploits. So Bo said, Jack, can I have breakfast with you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘There are some things going on in Idaho. A guy by the name of Randy Weaver is barricaded into his home with his family, and his son has been killed and it looks like there could be more death if something doesn’t happen. I’ve been asked by the FBI to become involved because Randy Weaver served under me in the Special Forces, and they believe he will talk to me. So I’m going up there and will you come along as my backup?’ ”
“Why did he feel he needed backing up?” I asked.
“Colonel Bo and I are hated by the government,” said Jack. “He was worried that he’d go up there and all the guns would be pointed at him. They’d blow him to pieces and blame it on Randy Weaver. So I was his insurance.”
“What happened when you arrived?” I asked.
“It was surreal,” said Jack. “It was incredible. I’ve never seen so many FBI agents, U.S. marshals, local police, state police, in one place in my life. There were bulletproof vehicles that were used to transport troops in, armored personnel vehicles, military uniforms, face paint on their faces, bulletproof vests. They had completely taken over this very small town.”
Jack paused.
“And by now there were around two-thousand people on the other side of the barricade, there to support the Weaver family. You had a mixed bag from preachers, to neighbors, to people like me, to neo-Nazis from Aryan Nations up the road, to even some liberals.”
“Aryan Nations were there?”
“You know what,” said Jack. “There are probably no more than fifteen of those radical crazies up at Aryan Nations at any one time, but the media likes to portray that there’s thousands up there. But the neo-Nazis were down at the roadblock for the wrong reasons. You’ve got the radio saying that an anti-Semite has killed a U.S. marshal, and Aryan Nations thought, ‘Good. Let’s go down there and support him.’ So there are citizens on one side of the barricade and military and police on the other side of the barricade.”
“And when you got up onto the mountain,” I said, “what conversations did you have with the Weaver family?”
“Randy was crying and the children were crying,” he said. “So I would speak for a while and then Bo would speak for a while. We’re trying to calm the girls down, get them to stop crying and to focus on something other than their mother lying underneath the kitchen table in a pool of blood. This was unbelievable trauma. Every time they had to get food, there was her body.”
“And this was a week after she’d been killed?” I said.
“A week after,” said Jack, “in a cabin that was very stuffy. And Kevin had gangrene, having been shot by the sniper. They had blocked the windows and the doors with rags so the government couldn’t see them and shoot them. So it was real stuffy.”
“What were the conversations about?” I asked.
“Bo found a stick about this long,” said Jack. “He got onto a stump and he was holding this big staff. He looked like Moses.”
“So you were still outside at this time?”
“The girls didn’t want to let us in,” said Jack. “They didn’t know us and they didn’t trust us. Anyway, it was really something. Bo had found out that Randy and the girls knew all about this world conspiracy. Randy and Vicki were very good parents. They’d explained it all to the kids, about how this group of very powerful people are setting up a New World Order. So Bo went over all these stories about how the money is controlled, about these secret organizations like the Bilderberg Group. But Randy and the girls already know this. So what Bo’s doing, see, is he’s talking to the five hundred militarized police lying in the bushes. He’s talking to them. So he had a captive audience all day Saturday.” Jack laughed. “The government hated us for that. These guys are not supposed to know about all this, and Bo’s giving dates and names and times. Randy and the girls knew what he was doing. It was really neat.”
This is what Jack said that Bo talked about that day: He said that the secret rulers of the world call themselves the Bilderberg Group and they rule the world from a secret room somewhere. He said that every year this global elite go to a secret summer camp north of San Francisco called Bohemian Grove, where they get together and “do all types of debauchery, sexual perversion, you name it. It’s a really weird club and the same people who belong to the Bilderberg Group belong to it. They’re witches and warlocks, and they are into anything that is evil.”
Jack said that what happened at Randy Weaver’s cabin was a great awakening, not just for him and for Colonel Bo Gritz and for the five hundred troops lying in the bushes in full jungle camouflage, but for the world in general and the United States in particular.
It is true to say that during the months that followed the end of the siege, the United States militia movement—which had not previously existed, to speak of—reported a massive upsurge in their membership. Jack was inundated with inquiries about how to fight the New World Order.
IT WAS THE Monday lunchtime, ten days into the siege, that Bo and Jack finally convinced the Weaver family to come out of the cabin and take their case to court.
“It was so wonderful to see the door opening and those little girls come out and take off their weapons,” said Jack. “And they were the saddest days of my life that were spent on the top of that mountain. When I realized that my fellow police officers and soldiers were capable of that. These militarized men in their woolly bully outfits had executed the boy. When Sammy Weaver saw his little dog being shot, when little Sammy saw that and he opened fire, they almost cut his left arm off. Little Samuel who looked like he was ten, they shot his left arm to where it was hanging by the flesh, and he yelled, ‘Dad, I’m coming home, Dad,’ and at that time my fellow officers took this MP5 machine gun and just sprayed him up the back . . .
“Well, I carried the little girls down to the military force, these big guys, face paint, they all looked like trees and bushes, and their tears were coming down and streaking their face paint. They were all crying.”
Jack cried as he recounted this story. Then he said, “And that’s why there are so many people today that are speaking out against this damnable New World Order.”
IN THE END, Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris were charged with murder, conspiracy, and assault. The trial was a disaster for the government. The jury acquitted Kevin Harris of all charges, and convicted Randy only of failing to appear on the original firearms charge. He served sixteen months in jail.
The government paid Rachel and Sara and Elisheba $1 million each in an out-of-court settlement, hence Rachel’s house and horses and minigym in the spare bedroom.
The American media, while continuing to refer to Randy Weaver as a white supremacist—which they still do—became highly critical of the handling of the case by the FBI and the ATF. It was just about the worst publicity these two law-enforcement agencies had ever received. The judge declared that the government had shown a “callous disregard for the rights of the defendants.”
Jack McLamb said it was no coincidence that at the height of this bad press, the ATF announced with some pride that they were taking military action against a violent, child-abusing gun-hoarding religious cult holed up in a compound down in Texas.
I don’t know if it was a coincidence or, as Jack said, an exercise in public relations. Whatever, six days into Randy Weaver’s trial, fifty-three adults, including David Koresh, and twenty-three children were burned to death at Mount Carmel outside Waco.
The remains of the Weaver cabin became a place of pilgrimage for this new army of believers in the secret rulers of the world. One of the pilgrims was Timothy McVeigh; he visited Randy Weaver’s cabin, alone, some months before blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. McVeigh considered the Murrah Building to be local New World Order headquarters.
One out of eight Americans
has hard-core
anti-Semitic feelings
This quarter-page advertisement occupied the front page of the New York Times a few weeks after I visited Jack McLamb. The ad had been paid for by the Jewish defense organization, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith.
When journalists report stories about American anti-Semites, they often end up paying a visit to the ADL in their New York headquarters. The ADL provide you with fact sheets. They have fact sheets on pretty much everyone—from obscure, uncelebrated militia leaders through to famous Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazi organizers.
They have offices in every state in America, a budget big enough to take out front-page ads in the New York Times, and a direct line to the president and the State Department and the FBI, who act on the information they provide.
It is no exaggeration to say that the ADL has the last word on who is an anti-Semite and who is not. They are the ones who decide. Then they inform the rest of the world, and the rest of the world, including me, goes along with it.
So I visited Gail Gans, their chief researcher into anti-Semitism in the American heartland.
Gail told me that one out of eight Americans has hard-core anti-Semitic feelings. She said that much of that has to do with those people who like to mythologize the Weaver siege as evidence that the “New World Order”—which is a code word for “International Jewish Conspiracy”—really exists.
Gail said that the job of the ADL has become akin to that of a code breaker.
“We lay out the program to the people of the world,” she said. “This is who the anti-Semites are. These are the words they use. This is a code word and this is what it means.”
Gail rifled through her drawer and she handed me pamphlets with titles such as “Armed and Dangerous.” They referred to Colonel Bo Gritz as “an extremist,” Randy Weaver as “an extremist,” and Jack McLamb as “an anti-Semitic extremist conspiracy theorist.”
“I’m surprised,” I said. “And also shocked. I’ve been with Jack McLamb, and he really didn’t strike me as an anti-Semite.”
“That’s because he’s clever,” said Gail. “He doesn’t come right out and say anti-Semitic things. He uses code words.”
I asked Gail to list for me the code words—the words that mean Jew without actually saying Jew. Here are some of them:
“International Bankers.” “Internationalists.” “Cosmopolitans.” “Secret Government.”
“New World Order.” “International Financiers.” “That Strange Group Behind the Media.” “Culture Manipulators.” “The Middlemen in New York.” “The New Yorkers.”
And, yes, Jack McLamb had said some of those things to me. Could they be code words? They seemed so abstruse. If people couldn’t figure out that they meant “Jew”—and I am usually sensitive to these matters—what was the point of having them? Where would it end? Was Jack McLamb being clever?
“Randy Weaver,” said Gail, “is now going around the country giving speeches about what happened to him. And, on a human level, I’m sorry for what happened. But I also know that a”—Gail paused, grappling for the right words—“a sane person upon being asked to surrender wouldn’t have taken their children and their dog and gone into a mountain cabin. This wasn’t a game.”
“But that makes it sound as if Randy Weaver was fleeing justice and holing up in some cabin, when in fact all he did was stay home with his family,” I said.
“Randy Weaver could have surrendered,” said Gail. “He didn’t have to take his family up to that cabin at all . . .” (What, I wondered, did Randy Weaver’s choice of accommodation have to do with protecting the Jewish people from anti-Semitism?)
“He says it was trumped-up charges. Trumped-up charges? He tried to sell weaponry to an undercover ATF agent.”
“But Sammy Weaver was ambushed and he didn’t have a chance,” I said.
“So Weaver says,” smiled Gail. She shrugged. Then she said, “Do I feel critical of law enforcement in this case? Yes. I’m sad it played out that way. But I’m also sad that the people in charge didn’t make it stop before it started.”
“The people in charge?” I asked.
“I mean Randy Weaver,” said Gail.
“In charge?” I said.
“Randy Weaver has become a martyr to a government gone crazy.” She sighed. “A martyr to an unfeeling, masterly, all-powerful government that’s trying to take the population of the United States and rub it under its heel. That’s the way the extremists see the government . . .”
But the word “extremist” was suddenly indistinct to me. Unfeeling, masterly, and all-powerful seemed smack on when it came to outlining what befell the Weaver family. Or was I imagining my own family in that cabin? After all, Randy Weaver could have surrendered (I would have). He did attend Aryan Nations (I wouldn’t have).
“Randy Weaver and his friends see themselves as the only stand-up guys against the New World Order,” said Gail. “And when you stand up against the New World Order bad things happen to you, and now you have Randy Weaver as a martyr and now you have David Koresh as a martyr.”
“OOH! WHITE supremacist!”
Randy Weaver grinned and he gnarled his face up like he was a movie villain.
“That’s big news. Who wants to report on the ice-cream social? That won’t sell a damn thing. This is exciting stuff. People go to car races to see wrecks. They love blood and guts. People are cruel. On the whole,” said Randy Weaver, “I don’t trust people.”
It was Saturday. I had picked Randy up from the Dallas airport and we drove down towards Mount Carmel near Waco, the site of the Branch Davidian church that had been besieged by the same team, right down to the individuals, that had organized and executed the Weaver siege.
(Randy’s siege became widely known as “the Siege at Ruby Ridge” even though there was no such place as Ruby Ridge. The Weaver family lived in a nameless place somewhere between Caribou Ridge and Ruby Creek. Rachel had told me that “Ruby Ridge” probably sounded kitschy to the reporters at the time, which was why it stuck.)
Randy drove down Interstate 35. He smoked just about an entire packet of cigarettes during our two-hour drive. His enormous biker sunglasses hid half of his face.
“I can joke about Ruby Ridge now,” he said, “and keep going. I couldn’t for a while. I can watch a Western again now. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I know we all had it. Even Elisheba. Elisheba remembered that shit until she was two and a half: ‘Blood! Mama fall down! Mama needs help!’ She made everyone in the room start crying. She still says, ‘I wish Mama hadn’t died.’ Well. Hell, yeah.”
Randy turned the air-conditioning on full.
WE STOPPED OFF for breakfast in a mall en route to Mount Carmel.
“Did Rachel talk to you about what happened after we locked ourselves into the cabin?” asked Randy.
“A little,” I said.
At this, Randy leaned forward. He took off his sunglasses.
“What does Rachel remember?” he said.
“She remembers the tanks smashing the generator,” I said.
“I didn’t talk to Rachel about these things for years,” said Randy. “I didn’t even know that Rachel had seen them shoot me and shoot her mother. I just didn’t know that.”
“What else happened after you locked yourself in the cabin?” I asked him.
“Vicki used to make up little songs to sing to the kids, and so we sang those songs. Oh, I can’t remember. Did Rachel talk to you about it?”
“A little,” I said.
“I remember the radio,” he said. “The radio said, ‘Crazy bastard, white supremacist, has murdered a U.S. marshal.’ So this was a big deal now. You’ve got a dead cop. They didn’t mention that Sam had been killed. This cop is worth more than my son? I don’t think so. Duh. He isn’t worth more than my dog. But a U.S. marshal had got murdered. That was the big thing. Well. It wasn’t the big thing to us.”
RANDY HAD NEVER visited the ruins of the Branch Davidian church at Waco. But for hundreds of thousands of Americans, perhaps even millions, the Weaver siege and the burning of David Koresh’s church are forever linked, proof of a government gone crazy, a New World Order coming to kill whoever does not bow down to them.
We paid the check and drove the last few miles. We asked directions. Everyone knew the way. And then the place appeared, among flat green fields, a landscape that looked almost English, off a country road, behind a lake.
We pulled into the parking lot, near burned-out school buses and razor wire and wreckage from the old church, lying in the grass. Among this wreckage was a shining new building. For six months local volunteers had been spending their weekends rebuilding the church. It was nearly finished.
We jumped out of the car. The volunteers stopped working and looked up at us and I heard some of them whisper, “Is that Randy Weaver?”
Randy was hugged by strangers. When people asked him how he was doing, he said, “I ain’t been shot at lately. Yep. Things are looking up.”
There was a little laughter.
THE VOLUNTEERS HAMMERED and sawed and painted the doors. Some wore T-shirts that read “Death to the New World Order.” I saw one man wearing an official Ruby Ridge T-shirt: “Ruby Ridge—Freedom at Any Cost.” Randy sold these T-shirts most weekends at gun shows around the United States, along with the opportunity to “Have Your Photograph Taken With Randy Weaver. $5.” This was how he earned a living. The photographs were taken by his new wife, Linda, on a Polaroid Instamatic, and Randy would sign them “Freedom at Any Cost.” But contrary to what Gail Gans at the ADL had said, Randy did not give speeches about what happened to his family. He was not a public speaker, he told me. Even the thought of it made him nervous.
Inside the new church—it looked just like a normal country chapel—they hung chandeliers. Outside they mowed the lawn between the memorial trees (one for each person who died at Waco—it was now a small forest). Randy glanced at the volunteers. He said, quietly, “I wonder which of them are undercover snitches.”
“Might some be here?” I whispered.
“I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute,” he said.
“Right here now?”
“They blend right in,” said Randy.
More volunteers approached Randy, shook his hand, and asked him to pose for photographs.
I got talking with an elderly man called Ron Dodge. Ron started telling me about the Bilderberg Group.
“I keep hearing about the Bilderberg Group,” I said. “Who are they?”
“They’re the men that run the world,” said Ron. “They start the wars. They cause the famines. They control the governments. They choose the presidents. Both candidates. They’re setting up the One World Order.”
“Do you believe that there’s a connection between the Bilderberg Group and what happened to Randy Weaver?” I asked him.
“Sure,” said Ron. “Their plan is pretty basic. They go into a nation. They create chaos. This is their philosophy. Stir up the people. Take over the power. And why have we never heard of them? They own the media.”
“They say that the people who control this world can sit around one large table and have lunch,” chipped in a passing militiaman from Michigan called John. “That’s the Bilderberg Group.”
“What’s the Michigan Militia doing here?” I asked John.
“We are here to ask these people’s forgiveness for sitting around on our butts and watching it on TV,” he replied. “What happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco will never happen again, under any circumstances. If it does there will be immediate retaliation, armed resistance, from the Michigan Militia.”
The volunteers sawed and drilled in nails, and I could no longer hear what Ron and John were saying, so we took a walk through the memorial garden towards the lake.
“Television’s an interesting thing,” said Ron. “When this siege started here at Waco, I could not imagine that they would burn these people up. But they did. Then I thought there’d be such an outcry it would bring down the government. But the silence was deafening. When I asked people about it they said, ‘David Koresh was a bad guy. He deserved it.’ I started thinking, What’s wrong here? There’s something wrong. I kept thinking about it. Then I found out one day that television is not a steady light, it’s a rapidly flashing light. As soon as I got that little bit of information, I realized what had happened. One of the ways you hypnotize people is with a rapidly flashing light. Everybody is hypnotized. What happened here, and what happened at Ruby Ridge, was that they programmed the world to accept that murder is OK.”
“Tell me more about the Bilderberg Group,” I said. “Where do they meet?”
There was a silence.
DUSK FELL, AND Colonel Bo Gritz arrived in a glistening trailer home. He helped with the hammering for a while, and then the volunteers lit campfires and ate from a barbecue and Bo and Randy hugged each other and reminisced about the siege at Ruby Ridge.
I joined them after a while. We sat on plastic chairs next to Bo’s trailer home. Bo Gritz looks just as a retired Green Beret colonel should look. He is heavyset, with a shock of white hair.
As Randy and Bo and I talked, we began to attract a small audience. Alex Jones came and sat down with us. Alex is a popular radio talk-show host from nearby Austin. His anti-New World Order radio show—InfoWars—is syndicated to forty cities across America.
Randy said to Alex, “Let me shake your hand. I’m a big admirer of yours. I love your show. You’ve got some guts.”
More volunteers came and sat down, and our chat became something like the after-dinner entertainment.
Randy has changed since the siege, since the death of his wife. I imagine that Vicki was the one with the passionate hatred for the New World Order, and Randy was happy to go along with it because he loved her, just as long as she didn’t object to him cutting loose once in a while to go drinking with his friends from Aryan Nations. Back then they read the Bible most nights. Now Randy is an agnostic. He no longer believes that the New World Order, the Bilderberg Group, the secret clique of international bankers, were responsible for the murders of his wife and son. Now he puts it down to a battle of egos—that moment when he made a big burlesque show of refusing to become a government informant.
“I laughed at them,” he said. “I don’t laugh anymore.”
But in this interpretation, Randy was pretty much alone. Just about everyone else sitting around the campfires considered the international bankers to be responsible for what happened at Ruby Ridge.
“I WANT TO TELL you something remarkable,” said Bo, “about what happened when we got Vicki’s body out of that cabin. I expected in August for there to be an extreme smell of death inside that cabin. Remember there were blankets all over the windows. It was very stuffy. Yet I didn’t have that powerful smell. This has got to be tough on Randy.”
“Besides from the terrible evidence of Vicki being shot in the face with a .308,” said Bo, “you would not have known that she wasn’t just asleep. Her skin was still supple.”
“And for how long had she been dead?” I asked.
“Eight days,” said Randy.
“Eight days,” said Bo.
“Eight days,” said Randy.
“I was in awe of her condition,” said Bo. “The Catholics believe that if the body is not corrupted, they consider that person to have died under grace. They look upon it as one of the criteria for sainthood.” Bo shrugged. “All I know,” he said, “is that her body was unlike any other of the hundreds I have personally handled. Eight days dead.”
“Eight days,” said Randy.
“It wasn’t anything like it was supposed to be,” said Bo Gritz.
“HOW COULD THE Aztecs sacrifice ten thousand people on some public holiday, eat their children’s hearts? I’ve been to their temples, I’ve seen the skulls buried in their walls, some nightmare horror. How could the Romans rip people apart, burn their city, just to do it, just to blame it on people? And we see decadent empires in their final stages of corruption, as they become insane. Engaging in mass murder. Just to do it. This is what is happening today. The New World Order are a bunch of sick control freaks!”
This was the voice of Alex Jones, every word in capital letters, no light or shade, all bellow, broadcasting live from Austin, Texas, right now, to five million people across America, and live on AOL, broadcasting to the world, if the world wants to hear it.
“When you allow the government to murder folks at Ruby Ridge, at Waco, at Oklahoma City, at the World Trade Center bombing—all government actions—when you allow this to happen, when you sit back and laugh, and you think you’re on the big team, the A-Team. Boy! You’re rooting for the government’s side! Because you’re a coward! And you sense that you’ll keep your little ostrich neck safe. And then your day is coming.”
Endearingly, Alex was hollering his powerful apocalyptic vision down an ISDN line from a child’s bedroom in his house, with choo-choo train wallpaper and an Empire Strikes Back poster pinned on the wall.
“Are you going to be that Aztec villager who hands his child over to be lunchmeat for the priesthood? That’s what’s going to happen to you! In a hi-tech form! We’ll be right back.”
“From his central Texas command center, deep behind enemy lines, the information war continues with Alex Jones and his GCM radio network, after this break . . .”
After I had met Alex at Mount Carmel, I discovered that it was his own idea to rebuild David Koresh’s church. He raised the $93,000 needed through donations from his listeners.
Randy had told me that Alex Jones was a true and tireless warrior. Now Randy had flown home to his new wife in Iowa—“She’ll shoot me if I miss my plane,” he said—and so I asked Alex if I could watch him broadcast his show.
“I am a war reporter!” yelled Alex to me, off the air. “That is what I do. There’s a whole buffet of corruption out there.”
“Are you sure that the people behind Ruby Ridge and Waco were also behind Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center bombings?” I asked him.
“That’s not even debatable!” he roared. “Well. I guess you could debate Oklahoma City. But the World Trade Center is not even debatable. Clinton’s Reichstag. Horror.”
Alex lit a cigarette. He flicked the ash into a styrofoam cup.
“We’ve gotta cut the Hydra’s head off,” he yelled, “and drive it back to its black abyss!”
“I still don’t quite understand,” I said, “the relationship between the Bilderberg Group and what happened to Randy Weaver.”
“The Bilderbergers,” said Alex, “are the Roman Senate. It’s a pyramid. They’re way up there. Below them you’ve got the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, then you’ve got us down here, the cattle, the human resources. And Randy Weaver is way out over there. See? He left. They hate that! So they scare the cattle back into the pen. See? Burn ’em out! I’m living in a place where black helicopters, one hundred and fifty miles south of me, are burning buildings, terrorizing people, and I’m the extremist?”
“Who says you’re an extremist?” I asked.
“The Anti-Defamation League!” he yelled. “The ADL are a bucket of black paint and a brush. They’re worse than the Klan. They get massive funding from the globalists. It doesn’t matter if your girlfriend’s Jewish, your little sister’s Korean”—Alex’s little sister is Korean—“anybody who wants to live free is a racist. The ADL is the scum of the earth. You aren’t going to use that last line out of context, are you?”
“No, no,” I said.
He turned back to his microphone.
“OK! We’re back!”
But we weren’t back. Alex was off the air. The ISDN line had mysteriously died.
“Damn!” he yelled. “Not again! This is the New World Order!”
Alex thumped the table and looked out of the window and saw a telephone engineer out on the pavement, fiddling with the box that held his ISDN line.
“There he is. You little turd! I’ve caught you this time.”
Alex ran outside to the pavement, leaving me in the studio with Violet, his girlfriend.
“This does not scare me,” said Violet. She looked out of the window. “The point is,” she said, “it does not scare me.”
“What does scare you?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” said Violet. “Not even the death threats. We’ve had phone calls, describing our house, describing our animals, voices like out of The Exorcist. Alex definitely has stalkers.”
“Sir!” bellowed Alex at the engineer. I could hear him through the windowpane. “It’s starting to get ridiculous. My nationally syndicated radio show has gone down. Again! You people have been cutting my lines, giggling and smiling. And your bosses deny you even exist . . .”
“Sorry,” said the engineer.
DEFEATED BY TECHNOLOGY, or by covert censorship, we headed off to the local TV studio, where Alex was scheduled to present a live TV talk show. We sat in the foyer while he prepared himself for his broadcast. There was a bank of monitor screens behind the reception desk, broadcasting all of Austin’s TV output.
For a while I watched all the channels at once. Then I noticed a figure on one of the screens. He had a face I recognized from somewhere, long ago, a middle-aged man with long, graying hair and sharp blue eyes. I walked over to the screen and turned up the volume. He had an English accent. He seemed to be talking about lizards—specifically about how the leaders of the New World Order, the clique of international bankers, are genetically descended from giant lizards.
And then, suddenly, I realized who it was. It was David Icke.
“Alex!” I called. “What’s David Icke doing on television?”
“Oh,” sighed Alex. “He’s big news.”
“Really?”
“You know him?”
“Well,” I said, “he once announced on the Terry Wogan talk show on the BBC that he was the Son of God.”
“That figures,” said Alex, wearily.
“He seems to be saying that the Bilderberg Group are twelve-foot lizards,” I said.
“DAVID ICKE,” yelled Alex, suddenly, “IS A TURD IN A PUNCH BOWL!”
“What do you mean?”
“He talks about the global elite, the Bilderberg Group, these power structures which are all real, all true. Meat and potatoes! Something you can bite into! And then at the end of this he says, ‘By the way, they’re all blood-drinking lizards.’ ”
“Really?”
“Al Gore needs blood to drink. So does Prince Philip. He’s discrediting the whole thing. You’ve got a nice fruit punch. Icke takes a great big dump right in the middle of it, and now nobody’s going to drink out of that punch bowl. That’s his job, and he’s doing his job well.”
“Are you suggesting that David Icke is in league with the global elite,” I said, “employed to make the whole thing seem ridiculous?”
“He’s either a smart opportunist con man,” said Alex, “or he’s totally insane, or he’s working for them directly.”
“LET’S TAKE some calls.”
“Hi. This is Marsha.”
“Hi, Marsha. What’s your point?”
“I just wanted to ask you a little about your background,” said Marsha. “Have you traveled a lot?”
“Yes,” said Alex.
“Where have you been?” asked Marsha.
“Where have you been?” said Alex.
“You haven’t answered my question,” said Marsha.
“You’re an aggressive twit, ma’am!” yelled Alex.
“Well, there’s no need to be rude.”
“I don’t like sniveling passive-aggressive people like you!”
“I just wanted to know your background.”
“I’m taking action!” roared Alex. “I’ve rebuilt the church at Waco. I’ve exposed black helicopters. Lady, you don’t want to face the truth of what’s happening! I KNOW ALL YOUR LITTLE PSYCHOLOGICAL SICKNESSES, LADY! YOU DON’T COUNT! YOU ARE FURNITURE! WE’RE FACING THE ENEMY AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID! CAN’T YOU FEEL IT? IT’S EPIC! NOW IS THE TIME. NOW! WE’RE ENGAGING IN AN INFO WAR, SIX HOURS A DAY! GIANT SHORT-WAVE TRANSMITTER TOWERS WORLDWIDE BEAM MY VOICE! SO THANK YOU FOR CALLING, LADY.”
I was getting a bit of a headache, so I slipped out of Alex’s TV studio for what I assumed to be the relative calm of the production booth. By now, Mike Hanson, Alex’s producer, was himself addressing Marsha on the phone.
“WE’RE TRYING TO RUN A SHOW HERE!” screamed Mike. “WHAT YOU ARE YOU? SOME KIND OF HIGH AND MIGHTY . . . YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR ASS FROM A HOLE IN THE GROUND! FUCK YOU TOO.”
Mike slammed down the phone.
“THAT WAS A B minus,” said Alex, once the TV show was off the air. “I do A-plus shows all the time.”
“You have a very powerful voice,” I said.
“Yep,” said Alex.
“So has Mike, your producer,” I said.
Alex looked confused.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Well,” I said, “when I left the studio I went into the production room and Mike was yelling at Marsha on the phone.”
“Was he now?” said Alex. “Is that so?”
“WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO?” screamed Alex at Mike. “UPSTAGE ME? OH, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE UP TO! MAKE A BIG SHOW OF SHOUTING ON THE PHONE! STEAL THE LIMELIGHT! AND THEN JON WILL WRITE ALL ABOUT YOU!”
“FUCK YOU!” yelled Mike. “YOU’RE PARANOID!”
“FUCK YOU!” yelled Alex.
“STOP IT! BOTH OF YOU!” screamed Max, the young and until now serene bespectacled vision mixer in the corner. Both men abruptly stopped yelling and turned to Max.
“What’s wrong?” said Alex.
“I’m just sick of you two shouting at each other all the time,” sobbed Max. “I’ve had enough.”
Max grabbed his coat and ran out of the studio. Alex and Mike glanced quizzically at each other. They shrugged.
“What was that all about?” said Alex.
IN THE SUMMER I flew back to Montana to visit Rachel Weaver. The last time I had seen her—when we had gone shooting in her backyard with her now ex-boyfriend Josh—she had offered me an open invitation to visit what was left of the cabin.
Ruby Creek was a two-hour drive from Rachel’s home in Montana. She did the driving. The bumper sticker on her 4-by-4 read HEY DUMB ASS! IT’S NOT GUNS! IT’S BAD PARENTING! She put CDs into her car stereo. She played Fatboy Slim and the Jungle Brothers, and a song she said was one of her mother’s favorites, the Statler Brothers’ “Flowers on the Wall.”
We stopped off for lunch. We sat at the counter. I asked her more about her family’s religious and political beliefs up in the cabin. She said it was hard to remember now. After her mother was killed they pretty much gave it all up.
“Let me think,” she said. “We didn’t have pictures or stuffed animals because we believed that was a re-creation of what the Creator had already made. We didn’t eat meat unless it had a split hoof and chewed its cud, like a cow or a deer. Marine life had to have fins and scales. No shark or eel. Um. Marrying your own race. Keep your race pure. Oh, I can’t really think. It was way deeper than that. I just can’t remember it.”
Rachel paused.
“Oh, yes. We held our Sabbath on Fridays.”
“Like the Jews,” I said.
“The Hebrews are not Jews,” said Rachel. “It’s all been twisted and rewritten.”
I looked quizzically at her.
“You should have seen some of the literature Mom showed us as kids,” she said. “It totally proves that the Hebrews were not Jews. I’m sorry if I’m offending you.”
“And you definitely weren’t white supremacists?” I asked.
She looked at me aghast.
“No way! We had nothing against Jews. Mom wouldn’t have turned anyone out. Never! She had the biggest heart. We never felt the white race was supreme to all others. Plus, we were the safest people when it came to guns. That’s why I’ve got such a problem with Josh. Yeah, we carried our guns a lot. I can see why that would be intimidating if you didn’t know us, but we’d never aim a gun at anyone.”
I believed Rachel. Once the siege had begun—once they’d locked themselves into the cabin—the only shots that were fired came from the outside, from the FBI snipers.
We paid up and got back into her jeep and Rachel played me some more songs: The Bloodhound Gang and Hot Chocolate—“You Sexy Thing”—and Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man.”
“Do you remember visiting Aryan Nations?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I remember the treasure hunts. We’d get together and find little pieces of paper that would lead us to clues. It was fun.”
“You don’t remember any weirdness?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes. “I remember a cross lighting. Oh. And they tried to do a swastika one year.”
“What do you mean?”
“They put a big old swastika on top of a couple of two-by-fours. They were going to burn it. But it was top-heavy. So it fell over.”
We drove through Bonners Ferry, a lovely little town on the banks of the Kootenai River, and then out into the country, past the Deep Creek Inn, the bar and restaurant where the Weavers used to go for special occasions, birthday meals and so on.
The cabin wasn’t as far from civilization as I’d imagined. There was a golf course within three miles. We drove up a little mountain lane, the jeep bouncing precariously along the potholed roads. Rachel’s gonk, her little red-and-black stuffed toy, fell off the dashboard. The tree branches scraped the windscreen and the paintwork.
“Oh, I should have brought pruners,” she winced, her hands clutched tightly on her zebra-print steering-wheel cover. The road narrowed even further.
“We used to build tree forts around here,” she said. “We used to play war games.”
I remembered the surveillance video the FBI had released to the media during the siege. The surveillance tapes were shot in the weeks before Sammy and Vicki were killed, grainy footage filmed from across the mountain, showing Rachel and Sammy and Sara running around with guns.
We reached a small clearing.
“OK!” she said. “This is it!”
She parked up next to a giant rock that overlooked their driveway, the rock upon which Randy had fired Vicki’s .223 into the air, full clip, on hearing of his son’s death. She jumped out of the jeep and ran around the corner. I followed her. Then I stopped.
Rachel was standing on a square of linoleum where her kitchen used to be. The walls and the roof had gone now. They collapsed in the snow in 1998. All that was left of the cabin was the floor, jutting out over the ridge to a panoramic view of the Kootenai River valley, thousands of feet below. Rachel stepped into where her living room once was.
“Mom and Dad’s bedroom was above the kitchen,” she said. “Sam’s bedroom was right here.” Rachel indicated a space in the air.
“The sink was over here on this side,” said Rachel. “We used to have a back porch right there. About right here was where the front door was.”
An overturned stove lay in the doorway. There was a book on the floor. Rachel picked it up.
“Restoring Junk,” she read. She rested the book back on the floor. “Mom was good at that.”
There were more books and magazines scattered around—The Borrowers, and an old copy of The Spotlight newspaper: “Everything you ever wanted to know about the men who control our world . . .”
There were bottles of a “delicious whey-based drink” called Yenka Nutri-Whey, a hanging basket, an old pair of Sam’s shoes.
“Can you hear that?” said Rachel. I couldn’t hear anything. “Someone’s on their way up. Now we can run out onto the rock and see who it is!”
Rachel bounded over to the giant rock that overlooked the driveway. She climbed on top of it and listened.
“Nah,” she said. “It’s someone going up even higher. Yep. That’s what we used to do every time we heard a car. We’d all yell, ’Ooh! Somebody’s come to see us!’ Jeez. Something so simple can bring back all that excitement.”
I rummaged through the debris scattered around the cabin floor and the surrounding land, finding remnants of life in the cabin before the siege. I picked things up—cardboard boxes containing some empty spice bottles her mother used to keep, Elisheba’s baby chair.
“What are you doing?” said Rachel. “It’s just a bunch of junk.” She laughed. “All the things that used to be important to us were junk to other people,” she said. “The books and stuff. Now it’s junk to me and important to you.”
We wandered back to the jeep.
“Funny to think that they called this place a mountain fortress,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Rachel. “Our plywood house. They said it was a compound. That’s why they could sneak up within fifteen feet of us.”
WE DROVE BACK to the Deep Creek Inn and ate dinner on the porch overlooking Ruby Creek. Just as we were finishing, a man wandered out of the inn. He was holding a guitar.
“My name is Dallas Pike,” he said to Rachel. “I’m a musician. I moved up here about a year ago. What happened to your family is the reason why I moved to Idaho. I’ve been coming up here to that bridge every August, and I’ve been praying that I would finally get a chance to meet you or your sister or your dad. I have a feeling you might appreciate this song.”
And, without warning, Dallas began to play.
Bloodstains in the snow, bloody ridge, Idaho
Bloodstains in the snow, bloody ridge, Idaho
Some buffalo hunters and the FBI
Killed this land before our eyes
Bloodstains in the snow, Vicki Weaver and Waco
I looked over at Rachel. Dallas finished his song. He began crying, along with Rachel. He touched her hand.
“What happened up there happened to a lot of people,” he said. “I can’t tell you what an honor it is to meet you and to be able to sing my song for you.”
“Thank you,” said Rachel. “It really is a great song.”
Dallas stood up and walked back into the inn. Rachel was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I don’t know what to say to people when they do that.”
I got the sense that Rachel had enough on her plate without becoming a legend of the Wild West.
RACHEL WENT TO bed and I found Dallas sitting at the bar. We took a walk out to the river.
“Vicki Weaver was butchered like a buffalo,” he said, “standing in the doorway of her own home, holding her baby and crying out to God to protect the rest of her family from the mad dogs that had already shot her son in the back from an ambush.”
Dallas looked out at the river.
“But it’s beautiful out here in Idaho,” he said. “Sometimes you have to sit back and smell the pine trees. I come as often as I can. I stay as long as I can. I listen to the water. I’m very content here. I play my song and I travel hither and yon. I didn’t sing that song to make her cry. I sang it so she’d know she wasn’t alone. Just last week I played it down at the Rainbow Festival in southeast Montana, and this great big biker guy, tears were running down his face, he got up and came over and threw his arms around me and hugged me and kept crying. I played it at Nashville. You could have heard a pin drop.”
Dallas told me that he thought Vicki Weaver was one of God’s prophets.
“She spoke about how close we are to a totalitarian government,” he said. “She spoke about the one-world order, the single world currency. The military-industrial complex. She spoke about the Bilderberg Group. I did my own research and I found out just how right she was.”
We sat and listened to the river for a while.
“The truth is out there,” said Dallas. “Just like in the X-Files. You just have to look between the bullshit and the murders.”