The Illusion and the Reality By Charles Taylor

     I found the description of what went down with Randy Weaver, and the siege at Ruby Ridge very interesting, since it shows how vicious the Deep State agents can be. Of course, there has been much more evil since that time, such as the murder of rancher Robert La Voy Finicum (also discussed), but the Weaver case is still a good illustration for people who are not yet up to speed on how bad things really are under the surface veneer of modern life.
  https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/02/15/organizing-in-the-face-of-adversity-lessons-from-history-part-2-the-contemporary-environment/

“The Siege at Ruby Ridge is an instructive example of what we face, all the more so for the fact that it occurred almost thirty years before the fervid witch-trials of the present regime began in earnest. Randy Weaver and his family were Christian fundamentalist White separatists, targeted for destruction because of their beliefs. Randy and his wife, Vicki, moved from their native Iowa to remote Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to live independently off of the land. They simply sought escape from our fallen and degraded society. Randy dabbled in local politics, unsuccessfully running for sheriff in 1988. He was put on the federal radar in 1985 after a vindictive former neighbor wrote letters to multiple federal agencies spuriously alleging that Weaver had made threats against government officials, including President Reagan. The Weavers were interviewed and determined not to pose any threat; no charges were filed. At the 1986 World Congress of Aryan Nations, Weaver was approached by Kenneth Fadeley, a paid-per-conviction ATF informant; in 1989, Fadeley persuaded Weaver to sell him two shotguns. In a brazen case of entrapment, the ATF informant asked Weaver to saw them off and showed him where to shorten the guns. After Fadeley’s cover was blown in 1990, the ATF threatened to charge Weaver for selling the illegal sawed-off shotguns (even though the guns were shortened after the fact at the behest of an informant). Government agents told Weaver to act as their informant in order to make the charges disappear; principled, he refused.

He was loosely acquainted with members of the Aryan Nations, which was the target of prosecutorial obsession (akin to the current White Scare) due to the involvement of a handful of fringe members with The Order, a small, violent White supremacist group.  The leader of The Order, Robert Mathews, was burned alive in his own home by the FBI’s Orwellian Hostage Rescue Team in 1984. Federal agents mistakenly believed that Weaver was much more deeply involved than he actually was, which partially explains their zeal. Ironically, however, the Aryan Nations was already almost entirely compromised, with federal operatives from several different agencies (none of whom communicated with each other) occupying many of the key positions within the organization. To further coerce Weaver into acting as an informant, agents posed as a couple with a broken-down car; when he and Vicki stopped to help them, as kind rural White Americans do, ATF agents swarmed from the car, guns drawn, and violently threw Randy to the ground to place him under arrest. Vicki was pushed face first into the snow. Nearly destitute, the Weavers posted their beloved cabin as bond. Weaver still refused to be an informant. In 1991, Weaver was officially charged. His court date was set for February 20, but he was notified, not coincidentally, that it was set for March 20. After he failed to appear in court on February 20, the US Attorney’s Office, despite knowing of the erroneously communicated date, sought a grand jury indictment and obtained an arrest warrant. For the next eighteen months, the US Marshals Service spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a vast surveillance campaign that included psychological profiles, military aerial reconnaissance, a network of spy cameras placed throughout the surrounding woods, and mail interception. The agents even kept a record of the menstrual cycle of Sara Weaver, Randy and Vicki’s sixteen-year-old daughter. A voluntary surrender was negotiated and then rejected by the US Attorney.

On August 21, 1992, the federal hammer fell. Six Marshals, equipped with military camouflage, night-vision goggles, and M16 automatic rifles approached the cabin. The family dog, Striker, was alerted to their presence and started barking. The Weavers’ fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, followed the dog, along with Kevin Harris, a family friend. The firing was initiated when a Marshal killed the Striker to silence him, shooting him in the back with a machinegun. Sammy fired in the direction the shot had come from, and Randy called for Sammy to run back to the house. Sammy yelled, “I’m coming, Dad,” and was shot several times in the back as he ran away into the safety of his father’s arms. Sammy was killed instantly, his back torn to shreds by an agent’s machinegun. A Marshal was killed during the frenzy, and agents blamed Harris. Though Harris had fired back in self-defense, the federal agent was most likely not killed by him, but rather by friendly fire. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was called in. The cabin, presented in the media as an “armed compound,” was surrounded by hundreds of government agents. Rules of engagement were quickly drafted to authorize deadly force against the Weavers; agents present characterized their orders as “if you see ‘em, shoot ‘em.” On August 22, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy from behind, attempting to sever his spinal cord as he walked to retrieve his son’s dead body; as he staggered back into the cabin, Horiuchi shot Vicki Weaver in the head as she held their ten-month-old baby in her arms. Just like her young son Sammy had been the day before, she was killed instantly, the side of her face blown away. Randy pried their infant, crying “Mama,” out of its mother’s dead arms, and he and his daughter Sara dragged the bloody body of the mother-of-three through the kitchen. Kevin had been hit in his shoulder by the bullet that felled Vicki.

For the following eight days of the siege, as Sara prayed for deliverance and tended to her baby sister, her wounded father, their dying friend, and her ten-year-old sister Rachel, covered in her mother’s blood, the FBI used loudspeakers to taunt the family, saying inhuman things like, “Good morning, Mrs. Weaver! We had pancakes for breakfast. What did you have?,” “Did you sleep well last night, Vicki?,” and, “Behind every strong man there is a good woman. … Can we get some milk for [the baby]?” They named their base “Camp Vicki.” At one point during the siege, a local news crew observed gasoline being loaded onto an FBI helicopter which was then seen circling the Weavers’ cabin; after noticing that it was being videotaped, the helicopter left the area. Our government engaged in further psychological warfare. The telephone was kept constantly ringing, the loudspeakers always in use, the drone of tanks and helicopters in harsh cacophony. Brilliant spotlights were kept trained in the windows to make night indistinguishable from day. Similar tactics were used during the Siege at Waco, where agents destroyed the water supply, defiled a grave, and employed loudspeakers to blare the sounds of rabbits being slaughtered along with Tibetan chanting and roaring jet planes. In the aftermath of the siege, Randy was convicted only for his failure to appear in court. Kevin Harris was acquitted of all charges. Weaver received a three-million-dollar settlement, Harris a four-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement. The federal government attempted to destroy all copies of the FBI internal report. Evidence was “misplaced,” withheld, and fabricated. Horiuchi claimed that he could not see through the cabin door, but a sketch he made the day after the murder clearly shows Vicki in the window. This evidence was suppressed by the FBI, purposely mailed to prosecutors two weeks late and fourth class to boot. He pled the Fifth and had his manslaughter charge dismissed due in large part to behind-the-scenes lobbying for blanket immunity by none other than our current Attorney General, William Barr. Horiuchi received no punishment whatsoever and went on to slaughter more innocent civilians at Waco the very next year. The Ruby Ridge Task Force released a heavily-redacted report. The six Marshals who initiated the siege, murdered the Weaver’s dog, and murdered Sammy Weaver received the highest commendations. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute the FBI officials who covered up the tragedy, but one agent was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and a handful of others suspended for a few days. Deputy Director Larry Potts was censured (the same punishment given for misplacing FBI property) and eventually demoted following the massacre at Waco. In 1997, the cabin that the Weavers had poured their hearts and souls into collapsed under the weight of winter snow.

A more recent example of this violent suppression is the 2016 murder of the rancher Robert LaVoy Finicum. Finicum was a spokesman for the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom militia, which occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon for forty-one days at the beginning of 2016. The context for the standoff is labyrinthine; the core issue is the decades-long struggle over Western lands between the federal government and environmentalists on one side, and local governments and cattle ranchers on the other. The Bureau of Land Management owns over one-eighth of the landmass of the United States, including a massive majority of the Western states. The events that led to Finicum’s death can trace their birth to two events. The first was the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada, which began when Cliven Bundy’s cattle were determined to threaten the habitat of the desert tortoise. Bundy was then ordered to reduce his cattle population and the extent of their grazing; when he refused and discontinued payment of BLM grazing fees, he quickly became in arrears for over one million dollars. Federal agents began removing hundreds of Bundy’s cattle, killing several. Armed militiamen came to Bundy’s defense, culminating in a tense standoff. The second event, which most directly precipitated the events of January 2016, was the federal harassment of father and son Dwight and Steven Hammond. The Fish and Wildlife Service had attempted to buy out the Hammonds for years, to no avail, to add their land to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. In conjunction with the BLM, the ranchers adjacent to the Hammonds had all been forced out. Grazing permits were revoked, and fees significantly hiked for those remaining. The irrigation system that the ranchers had so painstakingly built was intentionally diverted, destroying once-thriving ranch land. Finally, ostensibly at the behest of environmentalists (despite the fact that the privately-managed land was in fact more biodiverse than the federally-managed land), the Hammonds also had their grazing permits revoked. Their land was fenced, and the process of removing their cattle began. When they set controlled burns, as they always did, they were arrested for the charge of arson on federal land. After one served one year in prison and the other three months, capricious federal prosecutors appealed their sentences to the Leftist Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Unsurprisingly, the harsher sentences sought were granted: five years for father and son. Two years later, President Trump pardoned the pair.

Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven, rallied hundreds of patriots (federal informants peppered among them) to the Hammonds’ defense, and they arrived in droves to occupy Malheur. LaVoy Finicum was among them; in his words, “It’s about freedom for all of us, and so I crossed the Rubicon and I came here.” On January 26, Finicum and several militia leaders had been granted a pass to attend a town hall meeting led by the sympathetic sheriff of Grant County. Traveling through Harney County on a remote stretch of Route 395, selected by federal agents for its unreliable cell phone service, Finicum’s convoy was ensnared in a trap set by the FBI. In unlit and unmarked vehicles, government operatives followed Finicum and suddenly turned on their lights, ordering his truck to pull over. He refused, stating his permission to visit the sheriff, and sped away to try to escape. Unbeknownst to him, however, the FBI had set another roadblock ahead, known as a “deadman” block because it presented no opportunity for escape. Finicum attempted to go around the block, but was stopped by agents and the presence of heavy snowdrifts. A member of the by now all too familiar FBI Hostage Rescue Team fired shots before Finicum had even stopped his truck; one shot pierced the ceiling of the truck, while the trajectory of the other is disputed. Reports vary on whether Finicum was out of the truck or not when the second shot was fired, and whether or not this second shot was fired almost immediately upon exiting. Agents claim that the shot went wild while he had not yet exited the vehicle, while some witnesses report that the shot hit Finicum in his side after he had stepped out. Finicum undisputedly exited the truck with his hands in the air and challenged the agents, “You back down or you kill me now. Go ahead. Put the bullet through me. I don’t care. I’m going to go meet the sheriff. You do as you damned well please.” Agents reportedly saw Finicum reach for his pocket, and he was shot three times in the back. One day short of his fifty-fifth birthday, the father of eleven was killed.

Agents did not attempt to provide Finicum with medical assistance for ten to fifteen minutes. A loaded 9mm handgun was found in his pocket. Those who report that Finicum was hit in the side by the aforementioned second shot claim that it is that which made him twitch to the side, supplying the excuse whereby he was killed; other witnesses report that Finicum was struggling through the snow, and that that is why he appeared to reach for his side. His own statements in the weeks leading up to his killing have led some to postulate that his death was a suicide-by-cop, including, “I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box” and, “I’m not going to end up in prison. I would rather die than be caged. And I’ve lived a good life.” What is not disputed is that Finicum was a sitting duck, surrounded on all sides by federal agents and Oregon State Troopers. The illustrious FBI Hostage Rescue Team failed to disclose the first two shots fired, saying that they had not fired at all, and agents collected their casings before they could be logged in as evidence. Before the commencement of the operation, the FBI ordered the Oregon State Police to remove their body cameras. Apparently, dashboard cameras were also disabled. After the killing, the FBI refused to submit to a recorded interview, and demanded that the off-the-record interview be conducted with the entire team, rather than one-on-one. Consequently, there is a lack of audio and video evidence; the government did release a heavily edited aerial surveillance video, but it only provoked more questions. The FBI agent who fired the first shot after Finicum left his truck, W. Joseph Astarita, was indicted for obstruction of justice and making false statements, but was acquitted. Astarita and the four other agents who attempted to conceal evidence were not placed on leave during the investigation into their actions. Some reports indicate that authorization for the operation came from executive “national command authority.” The Finicum affair provides us with yet another example of the disparity between the responses of “our” government to those on the Right and the Left. Leftist violence from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and Antifa is met with permissive silence, while patriots merely exercising their constitutional rights are deemed “White supremacists” and “domestic terrorists.” In December 2019, the House of Representatives of the Washington State Legislature labeled State Representative Matthew Shea a terrorist for his support of militiamen like Finicum. Leftist Weather Underground terrorists now rest on laurels in academia. In fact, the son of two of these cop-killers, Chesa Boudin, part of a long line of Leftist legal elite, is now the District Attorney of San Francisco. He is a graduate of Yale Law School; the next time someone refers to that institution’s prestige, just remember the gap-toothed face of Georgia Governor-in-exile Stacey Abrams.”

     A long extract, but the details should raise doubts in people new to the Deep State conspiracies about what is actually done to individuals who become problems, but never individuals from the Left. Of course, the main event are big things like 911, the rigging of elections, and vast paedophile networks, as seen with Epstein, but we have covered these in great detail. Sometimes things get clearer viewing the personal response. The sheer viciousness of the system is clearly exposed.