However, a circus of errors-first legal mistakes by a local part-time magistrate, and later the incorrect assignment of a court date for Weavers case-convinced the family that a Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) plot was afoot. Weaver's subsequent arrest on these gun charges was intended less to incarcerate him than to induce him to inform on others in the Identity movement. A government informant struck up a relationship with Randy Weaver, and this eventually resulted in Weaver's selling, at the informant s request, several illegally sawed-off shotguns.

Worse, their several visits to Richard Butlers Aryan Nations compound drew the attentions of the federal government. But the family found itself engaged in constant disputes with How many people in mainstream America sympathize with the antigovernment message of the militias? neighbors. There, Vicky Weaver could homeschool her children, and the family could to a degree live off the land. Fortified by their belief in biblical inerrancy and convinced by Identity hermeneutics of the imminence of the Apocalypse, the Weavers retreated to the isolation of a distant mountain cabin at Ruby Ridge in rural Idaho. The Weavers gradually absorbed not only the racist religious doctrines of Christian Identity, but became familiar with the world of UFOs and alien intelli-gences, the supposed machinations of the Bilderbergers and the Illuminati and, most of all, the alleged conspiracies of those who were said to be the literal offspring of Satan, the Jews. In this milieu of forgotten and forbidden knowledge, the earnest seeker is presented with a vast array of conspiratorial scenarios and religious visions which unfold against the backdrop of the timeless battle of good against evil.

Walter illuminates the cultic milieu in which the family of Randy, and Vicky Weaver was first introduced to the esoter-ic doctrines of Identity Christianity. Taken together, the two books cast light on the appearance in the American public square of an antigovernment anger that once was the province of the most distant fringes of American politics. Stern and Jess Walter tell much the same story, but from strikingly different perspectives. And many, especially in the Jewish community, note and fear the militias' potential for anti-Semitism. Many wonder whether the rapid growth of militias across the American heartland could have taken place without some significant mainstream appeal. In the wake of Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, public officials and private citizens have pondered the sudden appearance of the citizen militias. W HY ARE Americans joining private armies to fight the American government, while defining their actions as patriotism?' Kenneth S.

The Politics of Rage by Dan T. Carter