Commentators nationwide, left and right, saw Ruby Ridge at best as a public relations disaster and at worst as a rampage by a militarized superstate. As the New York Times argued in an editorial: Randy Weaver was a white supremacist. He lived as a heavily armed recluse in a cabin on a ridge in rural Idaho. Neither of those things is against the law in the United States.… There are a lot of lunatics out there in the woods. But it is not the job of Federal law enforcement agencies to behave in a way that seems designed to confirm their paranoia—especially when there is no proof they have
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