It was a phenomenon from the Wild West days of the Internet, it’d be like some kid today knowing about the viral marketing for Blair Witch Project or something.

huh??? I remember it very well and I’d probably never used the internet in my life at that point, and barely used it until 3 years later. I never thought of it as specially associated with the internet at all. I’m curious to know if other people here saw it the way you did. It was a wild news story. I didn’t see the website until years later.
The comet would have been a big and memorable event to me anyway. You could even see it in the daytime, and it happened in the summer when I was outside all the time.

I’m not arguing that Ruby Ridge didn’t get attention, I just don’t have a specific memory of it.
Re liberals feeling sympathetic for Weaver, if I’m remembering it correctly then it was a case with parallels to alot of bs drug stings where the guilty party probably wouldn’t even have done it without the prompting of undercover agents.