Educated

related to court appearances, were dropped. Randy Weaver had been
interviewed by major news organizations and had even co-written a book
with his daughter. He now made his living speaking at gun shows.
If it was a cover-up, it was a very bad one. There had been media
coverage, official inquiries, oversight. Wasn’t that the measure of a
democracy?
There was one thing I still didn’t understand: Why had federal agents
surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin in the first place? Why had Randy been
targeted? I remembered Dad saying it could just as easy be us. Dad was
always saying that one day the Government would come after folks who
resisted its brainwashing, who didn’t put their kids in school. For thirteen
years, I’d assumed that this was why the Government had come for Randy: to
force his children into school.
I returned to the top of the page and read the whole entry again, but this
time I didn’t skip the backstory. According to all the sources, including
Randy Weaver himself, the conflict had begun when Randy sold two sawed-
off shotguns to an undercover agent he’d met at an Aryan Nations gathering.
I read this sentence more than once, many times in fact. Then I understood:
white supremacy was at the heart of this story, not homeschool. The
government, it seemed, had never been in the habit of murdering people for
not submitting their children to a public education. This seemed so obvious to
me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.
For one bitter moment, I thought Dad had lied. Then I remembered the fear
on his face, the heavy rattling of his breath, and I felt certain that he’d really
believed we were in danger. I reached for some explanation and strange
words came to mind, words I’d learned only minutes before: paranoia,
mania, delusions of grandeur and persecution. And finally the story made
sense—the one on the page, and the one that had lived in me through
childhood. Dad must have read about Ruby Ridge or seen it on the news, and
somehow as it passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story
about someone else and had become a story about him. If the Government
was after Randy Weaver, surely it must also be after Gene Westover, who’d
been holding the front line in the war with the Illuminati for years. No longer
content to read about the brave deeds of others, he had forged himself a
helmet and mounted a nag.