Within and beyond the white power movement, the siege at Ruby Ridge—along with the 1992 Los Angeles riots that preceded it and the fiery, catastrophic end to the Waco standoff that followed in 1993—inflamed a renewed apocalyptic imaginary, a worldview characterized by intensifying urgency that would eventually lead to the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.1 If guerrilla war on the state characterized white power movement activity in the 1980s, spectacular state violence defined the early 1990s. White power activists reacted to these events with ideas of apocalypse on their minds.
