OK, let’s do the math.  He didn’t have enough money to pay the taxes on a house in rural Idaho.

In Absence of Malice the whole point was to get Paul Newman to lead them elsewhere.  No, that was just a movie and maybe a novel too.

If you see enough of them a pattern emerges.  We want you to talk because we want the higher-ups.  We want to squash the whole thing.  So, talk please or we’ll charge you with this crime.  Then we’ll use prosecutorial power (e.g., plea) to get you to talk.  We still want the higher-ups.

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You could say it started here, with Robert Mathews.  By the time Ruby Ridge started around the Summer of 1990 (the siege was 2 years later) Richard Girnt Butler was pretty much history.  The movement, at least from a criminal perspective, had been squashed.

Sometime long before the time they dished out $3.1 million to the Weaver family Louis Freeh admitted it was a new low for the FBI.  Ruby Ridge is well worth learning about.  The Ammon Bundy attention is another one, and it is on Frontline too.

I think it is something people in Idaho, and elsewhere in the West, still fight against.

Ruby Ridge seems to be about 4,500 feet elevation.  The property was about 8 acres (one site said 15).  I really want to go to Spokane because I have never been, but I suspect the cabin is virtually unreachable for months at a time during Winter.  People do carry guns around bears and mountain lions.

 

http://www.oregonwild.org/about/blog/what-media-missed-about-malheur

http://www.oregonlive.com/mapes/index.ssf/2012/01/charting_the_decline_of_oregon.html

 

Randy Quiad was appropriate for the role and the TV movies, usually based on a book or with input from people right on the front lines, are pretty accurate.  The Siege at Ruby Ridge (1996) provides background on the relatives and local friends and neighbors and every characterization can’t be wrong.  The cast and probably the budget are big time.  “Birthing shack” (put politely) and lots of turned heads to the religious fervor, you can’t make all that stuff up, including Randy himself with something of a boisterous side.

Put another way,