What the f*ck did you just f*cking say about me, you little bltch? Ill have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and Ive been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and Im the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the f*ck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my f*cking words. You think you can get away with saying that sh*t to me over the Internet? Think again, f*cker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. Youre f*cking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and thats just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little sh*t. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little clever comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your f*cking tongue. But you couldnt, you didn't, and now youre paying the price, you godd*mn idiot. I will sh*t fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're f*cking dead, kiddo.

Ruby Ridge

back in 1992, they hadn’t yet formed. A firefight between six US marshals and two boys and a dog, changed all that.

On 21 August that year, the marshals went to a location that became known as Ruby Ridge, near Naples, to scout a location where they might ambush a fugitive, Randy Weaver. Weaver had been holed up for a year and half with his family in his cabin, having failed to attend his trial on firearms charges.

The marshals aroused the attention of Weaver’s dogs. Alarmed, they retreated to a small clearing to the west of the house. Weaver ventured out, looking for the source of the disturbance. His 14-year-old son, Sammy, and his young friend Kevin Harris did the same on a separate route, following on the heels of a dog, Striker.

Weaver met the marshals first, they challenged him, and then he retreated into the brush. A minute later, the two boys and the dog came out of the woods. There was an exchange of fire. The exact order of events has been disputed for a quarter of a century, but the end result was that Sammy Weaver, deputy marshal Bill Degan and Striker were all dead.

The Weavers retreated to their cabin and laid Sammy’s body in a shed. Over the next day, federal and local officers – now under the command of the FBI – began to arrive in their hundreds to join the siege.

The next day, 22 August, operating under rules of engagement that allowed deadly force, an FBI sniper wounded Randy Weaver as he checked on Sammy’s corpse. The same sniper then shot Randy’s wife, Vicki, dead and wounded Kevin Harris.

The siege dragged on to the end of August, and the scene became a circus.

Neo-Nazis from the nearby Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake showed up to protest.

Other far-right groups poured in from all over the country to stand against what they saw as the persecution of an innocent family by a tyrannical federal government.

Ruby Ridge was resolved, in the end, not by agents, but by civilian negotiators including Bo Gritz, a former green beret, prolific conspiracy theorist, and the Populist party’s presidential candidate, who was briefly on a ticket with the ex-Klansman David Duke.

Along with the botched Waco siege the next year, during which 76 besieged members of the religious group the Branch Davidians died, Ruby Ridge badly damaged the credibility of the Clinton-era FBI (Bill Clinton became US president on 20 January, 1993), and boosted some emerging narratives on the far right: that the feds were coming for the guns and property of those, like Weaver, who wanted no further contact with a country they saw as irredeemably corrupt.

Mike German, a former FBI officer who at the time of Ruby Ridge was working undercover in white supremacist groups, and now Fellow at NYU’s Brennan School for Law and Justice, says that while the FBI “inherited a mess” when it took on the badly handled case, the bureau “ultimately saw it as a mistake, and an escalation that had caused significant harm, including to children”.

They made it worse, he says, by “engaging in a cover-up to hide their mistakes”. In 1997, E Michael Kahoe, who had helped supervise the FBI’s response, was sentenced to 18 months in a federal prison for burying documents critical of the agency’s approach to the siege ahead of the prosecution of Weaver and Harris.