Why Is the Right So Obsessed With the Apocalypse?

"One indistinct photograph is all most of us have ever seen of her, and in that image, taken by FBI surveillance, her face is as white as her long dress. She wears her dark hair loose, past her shoulders, and she has crossed her arms against her chest, as if she is distressed. Her family is barely out of frame in their cabin."

"The Weavers were conspiratorial and heavily armed, but U.S. officials had vastly overestimated the family and only realized the mistake toward the end of the siege. By then, their targets seemed less like a "murderous gang" and "more like a terrified family whose conspiratorial and apocalyptic faith rendered reasonable choices all but impossible," Jennings explains in End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America."

FBI surveillance captured Vicki Weaver in a white dress before she was fatally shot at Ruby Ridge while federal agents besieged her family's cabin. The sniper had intended to shoot Randy Weaver and struck Vicki instead, leaving her corpse to decompose. The Weavers combined conspiratorial, apocalyptic Christian beliefs with heavy armament. U.S. officials vastly overestimated the family and only recognized errors late in the siege, by which point the family resembled a terrified household whose apocalyptic faith made reasonable choices nearly impossible. Ruby Ridge fed narratives that later connected to movements like QAnon and reshaped aspects of American religious and political radicalization.

Read at Intelligencer