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Extremists posing as aid workers urge NC locals to tear down cell towers and hit military

Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer booking photo from 2018

Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer booking photo from 2018 (Courtesy Tucson Police Department)

Jordan Green November 02, 2024

A group of anti-government extremists who showed up in western North Carolina promising to provide disaster relief after Hurricane Helene is now threatening to destroy cell-phone towers and sabotage military vehicles.

The group, Veterans on Patrol, attracted attention by setting up a disaster relief staging area in the parking lot of the Ingles grocery store in Lake Lure, about 50 miles from Asheville.

But locals, including some who initially cooperated with the group, began to complain about threats and harassment.

Over the past three weeks, members of the group, which falsely claims that Helene was caused by a “weather weapon,” have been making conspiracy-driven claims that the U.S. military is attempting to kill U.S. citizens with “directed energy weapons.”

ALSO READ: Inside the grift that could cost Donald Trump the election

Veterans on Patrol’s channel on the encrypted social-media platform Telegram posted a message on Thursday displaying photos of what appears to be a cell tower on a mountaintop. The message asserted that locals “are in Live Exercises where the United States Military is permitted to destroy your homes, bodies and minds,” while suggesting that equipment on the tower “is solely for providing the U.S. military the means to murder Americans.”

“Focus on tearing down their weapons,” the message reads. It continues, “All it takes is one weapon tower being toppled with the stated reason spoken boldly.”

Another message posted in the group’s Telegram channel appears to advocate for sabotaging military vehicles and assets.

“Simple acts of pouring sugar into fuel tanks of military equipment, backup power systems, and personal vehicles of military personnel can wreak havoc on those who murdered all these people out here,” reads the message, which was posted on Wednesday.

Soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell have deployed to western North Carolina to assist in the disaster response, along with National Guard members from nine states.

Veterans on Patrol is led by Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, who has a long history of anti-government extremism, dating back at least 10 years. Meyer, according to the extremism watchdog group Southern Poverty Law Center, is not a veteran.

Reached by phone on Friday, Meyer doubled down on the threats.

“Jesus used bullwhips and flipped tables,” he told Raw Story. “We’re going to use our bullwhips and topple towers.”

At first during the interview, Meyer argued that the Telegram messages weren’t advocating for targeting cell towers, saying instead that the group would “surgically” remove the supposed “directed energy weapons." He went on to say that they would provide Appalachian residents with generators and Starlink boxes so they could maintain power and communication links.

Asked about the message referencing “pouring sugar into fuel tanks,” Meyer told Raw Story: “We’re going to destroy your tanks…. You want to get dirty? That’s what we should be doing.”

Veterans on Patrol has promoted multiple conspiracy theories based on false claims since arriving in western North Carolina.

One message posted on Telegram on Oct. 22 claimed that “Helene was a Weather Weapon steered to destroy the area, while also claiming that the investment fund BlackRock is attempting a “land grab” and describing the storm and its aftermath as “an act of war perpetrated against the People.”

As the final day of voting in the presidential election approaches, posts on the group’s Telegram channel have taken on an increasingly urgent tone.

The Oct. 22 post claimed that “stolen elections” are a real phenomenon, along with “weather weapons,” “Satanic pedophiles” and “adrenochrome," which refers to a QAnon conspiracy theory that a cabal of elites tortures children to extract a chemical from their bodies which is then used as a recreational drug.

In another post last week, a Veterans on Patrol member nicknamed “Shepherd” claimed that the U.S. Air Force command is instructing pilots “to deploy additional weather weapons.” The post goes on to say, “These people don’t have 2 weeks to wait for vote and 3 months to hopefully wait for a Regime change.”

Another message on the group channel that was published on Wednesday suggests without basis that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is the beneficiary of BlackRock’s supposed landgrab.

Speaking to Raw Story, Meyer seemed to all but dare law enforcement to intervene.

“For people to go and do something to prevent weapons from being deployed — that’s not a crime,” he said. “If they want to bring this to court and charge us with conspiracy, then let’s go.”

The FBI did not respond to an inquiry about Veterans on Patrol's activities, but Meyer told Raw Story in an email that he "would imagine the FBI knows full well what we are attempting through Operation Leaning Tower."

Meyer told Raw Story that he notified the office of Gov. Roy Cooper about his "operation." Cooper's office did not immediately respond to a voicemail message from Raw Story.

Phone calls from Raw Story for this story to officials in Lake Lure and Rutherford County, which surrounds the town, went unreturned.

Meyer’s history of extremism dates back to the Bundy Ranch standoff, when armed militants faced down the FBI and other federal agencies in 2014 during a dispute over rancher Cliven Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees. Meyer’s involvement in the Bundy Ranch standoff came to light later, when the Oregonian reported that he and a group of friends got into a brawl with other anti-government extremists during the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which Bundy and a group of armed supporters had occupied.

Meyer founded Veterans on Patrol in Arizona in 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Prior to presenting itself as a disaster response group in the aftermath of Helene, Veterans on Patrol has claimed its efforts were directed towards rescuing children from sex trafficking, addressing veteran suicide and dubious claims that the military is maliciously harming civilians. Meyer’s activities have frequently landed him in trouble with law enforcement.

Meyer was arrested twice in 2015 after emergency responders talked him down from a light pole in Surprise, Ariz. in 2015.

In 2018, was arrested by the police in Tucson, Ariz. for trespassing and an outstanding warrant for an assault charge, after occupying a tower on an industrial property. A press release from the Tucson Police Department claimed that Meyer “found an abandoned homeless encampment” on the property, “and fictitiously declared, without evidence or corroboration, that the area was the site of a sex-trafficking ring.”

The Tucson police said they received complaints from Tucson residents that Meyer and his followers had threatened and intimidated them, and Meyer made “multiple threatening and hostile remarks directed towards various elected and appointed officials” through social media.

In the summer of 2024, before Hurricane Helene, Veterans on Patrol was active in Spokane, Wash. In Telegram message from July 2, 2024, Veterans on Patrol announced to the police that it “would no longer be safe” for one of its officers “to work his beat.” The channel also posted the home addresses of city council members.

NOW READ: Fox News is the reason the race is close

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Retribution is at the center of Donald Trump’s third presidential election campaign.

“I am your warrior,” Trump proclaimed earlier this year. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump’s loyal surrogates have duly embraced the project — perhaps no one more zealously than Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who bills himself as the former and would-be president’s “future secretary of retribution.”

Raiklin is seeking to enlist so-called “constitutional” sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to detain Trump’s political enemies. Or, as he says, carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against individuals on his “Deep State target list.”

“This is a deadly serious report,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story. “A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom."

READ:Trump's far-right army is threatening bloodshed — believe them

Raskin called on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to “denounce this dangerous plot and to repudiate threats of, and planning for, political violence from any quarter. Bipartisan opposition to vigilante violence and assassination plots is essential for American government to continue.”

The list Raiklin has been circulating since January is extensive.

It includes numerous Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House Select January 6 Committee; U.S. Capitol Police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the Jan. 6 committee hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story — all considered political enemies of Trump.

Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police employee named on the list who as assistant director of intelligence and interagency coordination warned about the potential for violence in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, said she would not be intimidated by the list.

“Any hit list is designed to impart the silence and fear of those named on it,” Farnam told Raw Story. “But silence is victory for those who write such lists. Conversely, speaking the truth without fear will always be the undoing of those who seek to intimidate and spread hate in our world. I can never be silenced.”

In addition to Farnam, the list includes nine current or former U.S. Capitol Police employees. The agency declined to comment for this story.

Raw Story is not publishing the full list given the potential risk posed to people unaware that they’re on it.

One individual named on the list who spoke on condition of anonymity noted that Raiklin is associated with retired Lt. General Michael Flynn.

“And Trump himself has repeated on dozens of occasions calls for revenge, retribution and retaliation,” the person told Raw Story. “This is another example of that broader phenomenon of revenge against political enemies that animates the former president and his entire movement, and for that reason should concern us all.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story.

‘Attack on our democracy’

The accusations of “treason” and other imagined offenses leveled by Raiklin against these individuals are typically based on fanciful legal theories and outlandish factual claims, if anything at all.

For example: Raiklin, in a podcast, suggested without evidence that the unidentified person responsible for setting pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a subordinate-surrogate of the Capitol Police Board,” which oversees the Capitol Police.

But Raiklin is nothing if not self-assured that the “evidence” he’s gathering on anti-Trump “deep state” plotters is real. So real, it seems, that Raiklin claims the material — fully revealed — would establish probable cause for county sheriffs across the nation to issue arrest warrants for various high-ranking officials who have, in one way or another, run afoul of Trump.

Under Raiklin’s objectively bizarre plan, the sympathetic sheriffs would deputize some 75,000 military veterans — veterans he claims have been pushed out of service because they refused to comply with COVID-19 vaccine mandates — to carry out the arrests.

Raiklin has gone so far as to pitch his plan to a group of far-right sheriffs who met in Las Vegas in April.

Public records requests filed by Raw Story with dozens of county sheriff offices reveal that word of Raiklin’s efforts has reached the email inboxes of sheriffs from Wisconsin to Oklahoma.

But Raiklin’s effort to enlist these sheriffs appears to be foundering: Not one has openly signed on, and even some who are sympathetic to his cause publicly warn that his plan violates due process.

Undaunted, Raiklin has attempted to build relationships with conservative members of Congress, and aides to two Republican lawmakers who chair influential House committees confirmed to Raw Story that they are familiar with him.

An overriding reason for why Raiklin hasn’t been entirely marginalized or relegated by fellow conservatives to the realm of kooks and gadflies?

Raiklin uses the kind of hyperbolic language that Trump himself uses — and that Trump’s base eats up.

He gives federal agencies and media outlets Trump-like nicknames such as “FB-Lie,” “Faux-litico” and “National Poison Radio.”

“My nickname is the Deep State marauder, aka the mauler,” Raiklin told a group of election deniers in New Jersey earlier this year. “And I like using ice picks instead of poking the bear.”

In a video posted in May to X, which now accrued more than 10 million views, Raiklin said, “Expect to see live-streamed swatting raids of every single individual on that Deep State target list, because the precedence has already been set.”

Notwithstanding Raiklin’s claim that his plan would be “legal, moral and ethical,” swatting — the false reporting of an emergency to garner a response from law enforcement for the purpose of harassing a target — is illegal.

Raiklin has nevertheless promoted the idea in podcast interviews, multiple posts on X, a press conference and conversations with prominent far-right extremists.

In recent days, Raiklin’s rhetoric has escalated beyond setting out future hypothetical scenarios for retribution.

He mocked one former federal employee blocking him on X while suggesting that the targeted individual “wants me to speak to him in person” and asking him for his “preferred punishment for committing treason.”

And during a podcast, he claimed to be surveilling a U.S. Capitol Police employee, whom he mentioned by name, “both physically and digitally.”

Experts worry that provocative rhetoric from figures such as Raiklin could impose a climate of fear on civil servants simply trying to do their jobs. Even worse, Raiklin’s rhetoric could inspire violence against them.

“The idea that you would target anyone that was there on the basis of allegiance to the rule of law and the Constitution is really scary,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told Raw Story.

Stier’s organization promotes professional, merit-based civil service as a pillar of good governance — a notion that he said is being increasingly challenged.

“This represents, in my view, an attack on our democracy,” Stier said. “We have a rule of law. If any civil servants are violating the law, there are mechanisms in place to hold them accountable. Vigilantism is not the way to have a society function.”

Raiklin responded to a phone call requesting comment by posting a recording of the voicemail on his X account on Tuesday, while commenting: “Looks like Elements of the Deep State Target List have asked @jordangreennc of Raw Sewage to try to find out more about my list….”

Later, he acknowledged a set of written questions submitted by Raw Story but didn't answer them, while accusing Raw Story and "domestic terrorist leftists" of hounding him.

"Look at my entire Deep State target list," Raiklin said. "That is the beginning. This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?"

One prominent media organization named on Raiklin’s “target” list expressed concern for its journalists, five of whom also appear on the list by name.

“The conspiracy theories underpinning this list are baseless, and the calls for targeted harassment are dangerous,” Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the New York Times, told Raw Story. “The Times reporters on the list are simply professional journalists doing their jobs. Swatting is a criminal offense, and in the event of any instances directed at our employees, the Times will work with law enforcement to prosecute those responsible.”

Said Raw Story Publisher Roxanne Cooper: “Purposefully threatening and endangering the safety of working journalists is both reprehensible and illegal, and the American public should reject and denounce anyone who engages in such behavior.”

CNN, Reuters, the Atlantic and American Oversight declined to comment on Raiklin. Emails to the Washington Post, Politico, ABC News, NBC News and MSNBC, whose journalists are also named on the list, went unreturned.

Who is Ivan Raiklin?

As the 2020 election approached, conspiracy minded Trump supporters with active Twitter accounts were in abundance. Most never broke through the incessant MAGA noise, or merely added another note to its election denialism dissonance.

Raiklin was different.

He was a seasoned veteran with a background in military intelligence who wound up playing a small but significant role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s name.

Following a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces in which he served as a military attaché to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and foreign affairs specialist assigned to the Ukraine Crisis Team, Raiklin left the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 to run for U.S. Senate in Virginia, according to the Washington Post.

At the time, Raiklin’s candidacy in 2018 provided little indication of the MAGA loyalist relishing the destruction of Trump’s enemies that he would become.

If anything, Raiklin fashioned himself as a force of apolitical positivity.

“The reason I’m running is that we’ve had such a negative political atmosphere the past couple years,” Raiklin told theCourierin Iowa. “I want to inject a ‘positive disruption’ in the political conversation. Being a veteran of 20 years, I’m pretty much a political agnostic.”

But Raiklin didn’t get far: He failed to garner a sufficient number of signatures to make it onto the Republican primary ballot. And when he sued the Virginia GOP and the state Department of Elections, claiming that he was unfairly excluded, a federal judge tossed out the suit.

Following his disappointing foray into electoral politics, Raiklin began his turn toward Trump’s MAGA movement.

In 2019, he appeared at a QAnon-themed fundraiser for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, whom Raiklin met in 2010. (Flynn and Raiklin have become close in recent years, with Raiklin urging Trump to select Flynn as his vice presidential running mate and Flynn featuring Raiklin in his current speaking tour.)

Roughly a week after the 2020 election, when major media outlets had called the election for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Raiklin went on Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory show InfoWars and confidently predicted that Trump would ultimately obtain the necessary number of electoral votes to secure reelection.

“I absolutely guarantee it,” he said. “One hundred percent. Unequivocally. Full stop. There is no possibility that he does not reach 270.”

It's a classic example of how Trump’s followers often act on Trump’s wishes or anticipate his desires without receiving specific directives.

For months, Trump had been saying that the only way he’d lose the election is if Democrats stole it through fraud. Now, Trump had lost, and Raiklin was arguing that Trump was winning, against all evidence.

Raiklin, in essence, operates as an agent of Trumpism independent of Trump.

And as the 2024 election nears, the same dynamic is apparent: Trump articulates the broad themes, and his supporters scramble to put them into practice.

“Stand back and stand by” set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021, and now, “I am your retribution” serves as a solicitation to supporters such as Raiklin to put together specific plans for retribution against Trump’s political enemies.

‘Operation Pence Card’

Raiklin’s primary contribution to the effort to overturn the 2020 election is a memo he drafted for the benefit of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Entitled “Operation Pence Card,” it proffered a novel legal argument that Vice President Mike Pence held the authority to set aside electoral votes from states narrowly carried by Biden.

The plan is widely associated with attorney John Eastman, who now faces charges of racketeering and conspiracy in Georgia, and with conspiracy, fraud and forgery in Arizona.

But Raiklin actually tweeted out his plan one day before Eastman drafted his now-infamous stop-the-steal memo. And Raiklin wielded enough influence that Trump himself, on Dec. 23, 2020, retweeted Raiklin’s “Operation Pence Card” tweet to his tens of millions of followers.

Around the same time, Raiklin dined with then-Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who attended a meeting at the White House along with other House Republicans to discuss plans to object on Jan. 6 to the congressional certification of the presidential election — the final, generally ceremonial step before a presidential inauguration.

On Jan. 4, 2021, Raiklin had told Jerome Corsi, a longtime conspiracy theorist, that with regard to Trump supporters descending on Washington, D.C. en masse: “I am not calling for any violence, but at the same time, I can’t stop people from committing it.”

Raiklin was present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 when a pro-Trump mob breached Congress’ defenses and temporarily stopped lawmakers’ electoral vote certification. Raiklin has not been charged with any crime related to the attack.

Following the Jan. 6 attack, the Army Reserve opened an investigation into whether Raiklin violated its rules against partisan political activity, but by early 2022, the service had cleared him of wrongdoing.

Raiklin has said the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have also investigated him, but those investigations likewise concluded without formal accusations of wrongdoing against Raiklin.

“So what does that trigger me to do?” Raiklin said during a presentation to a group of election deniers in New Jersey in February. “It weaponizes me against them. And so, since they haven’t found anything, and you’re investigating me, sir, I have the capability and capacity to start digging into you, your family, your friends, your associates — every single thing that you do in your life.”

Whitewashing the crimes of violent J6 rioters

While avoiding prosecution himself, Raiklin has eagerly taken up the cause of defendants who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted for their role in the Jan. 6 attack.

In June, Raiklin held a press conference in Detroit to promote his “live-streamed swatting raids” scheme. He did so alongside Treniss Jewell Evans III, who served a 20-day prison sentence for illegally entering the Capitol. Also speaking at the press conference: Sarah McAbee, the wife of a former sheriff’s deputy who is currently serving a 70-month sentence for assaulting a Washington, D.C., metropolitan police officer.

Ronald Colton McAbee, Sarah McAbee’s husband, wore patches with the word “SHERIFF” and the emblem of the anti-government Three Percenter movement on his clothing while taking part in an hours-long battle at the mouth of the Lower West Terrace Tunnel on Jan. 6.

A GiveSendGo campaign to support his wife applauds McAbee for answering “the call to stand up for our nation,” but following his conviction the Department of Justice described him as witnessing rioters knock an officer defending the U.S. Capitol to the ground. McAbee’s response was the opposite of rendering aid, according to the government.

After the officer was kicked and stripped of his baton by rioters, the government contends that “McAbee stepped into the archway, grabbed the officer’s leg, and pulled him further toward the crowd. When a second MPD officer stepped off the police line to assist the downed officer, McAbee stood up, yelled at the officer who had stepped out to assist, and then swung his arms and hands towards the officer’s head and torso. McAbee made contact with the officer and was wearing the reinforced gloves at the time of the assault.”

In the run-up to Jan. 6, Raiklin had baselessly ascribed the legitimate election of Joe Biden to “domestic fraud” committed by people “potentially under foreign actors’ payroll.” Now, at the press conference in Detroit in June 2024, Raiklin was inverting the violent crimes committed by Trump supporters to portray them, not the officers defending the Capitol, as the victims.

“You need to know who is coming after us,” Raiklin said, naming two people who are part of the U.S. Capitol security apparatus. Without presenting any evidence, Raiklin accused one of the men of “weaponizing and working with the DOJ… to criminalize against Sarah’s husband.”

Cultivating relationships with House Republicans

All the while, Raiklin is forging ties with Republican lawmakers who are sympathetic to the Jan. 6 rioters.

While leveling outlandish charges of criminal misconduct at federal civil servants, Raiklin has become a familiar presence at congressional committee hearings controlled by Republican lawmakers eager to downplay the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, or, alternately, shift blame to Democrats for the violence.

Raiklin has sat in the gallery behind the witnesses in at least five House committee hearings over the past year.

Among them: the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), the House Oversight and Accountability Committee chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

“I don’t just sit back behind the witnesses when I’m in the House,” Raiklin said on a podcast in May. “For 15 months, I’ve been grinding day in and day out talking to dozens of members of Congress giving ideas on what needs to be done.”

On another podcast, Raiklin said: “The only person that understands this is a guy by the name of Barry Loudermilk…. Why? Well, because he’s doing the right thing. And I get an opportunity to explain this to him and his staff regularly.”

Nick Petromelis, an aide to Loudermilk, told Raw Story he, Petromelis, is “familiar” with Raiklin.

Loudermilk ignored a request from the now-defunct House Select January 6 Committee to explain a tour he gave to constituents on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. His committee deposed Farnam, the former U.S. Capitol Police intelligence leader who is on Raiklin’s target list, last month.

Austin Hacker, an aide to Comer, likewise said he, Hacker, was aware that Raiklin had attended House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearings.

Despite promising in late May that he would find out whether Comer had personally spoken to Raiklin, Hacker stopped responding to follow-up messages from Raw Story.

Raiklin said on a podcast in May that he has sent his “Deep State target list” to Comer, Jordan and the Administration Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Loudermilk.

Hacker told Raw Story that Comer, his boss, does not have the “target list” document. Aides to Jordan and the House Administration Oversight Committee did not respond to emails from Raw Story seeking confirmation that they received copies of the list.

None of the three House members responded to requests for comment about whether they support Raiklin’s antics.

Raiklin has singled out other members of Congress for praise. Of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who filed legislation to hold U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland in “inherent contempt,” Raiklin said she “has exhibited the maximum courage that her position allows.”

Luna’s legislation would hold the attorney general in “inherent contempt” for refusing demands to turn over audio of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden, related to Biden’s retention of classified documents in the garage of his Delaware home. “Inherent contempt” is a tool that would allow the House sergeant-at-arms to take Garland into custody and compel him to sit for a congressional proceeding. Raiklin told one podcaster that he “saw” Luna at a congressional hearing in May.

Luna’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

‘Go to the maximum level’

While cultivating ties with members of Congress, Raiklin has been lobbying sheriffs — with mixed results — to join his effort.

To reach potentially sympathetic sheriffs, Raiklin has focused on an organization called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.

Under the leadership of Richard Mack, a former sheriff from Arizona, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has promoted the controversial view that county sheriffs are the highest law in the land and are within their rights to ignore any federal and state laws that they deem to be unconstitutional.

But Mack told Raw Story he has severed ties with Raiklin since talking with him in early June, and that he disapproves of Raiklin’s rhetoric.

During the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s annual convention during April in Las Vegas, Raiklin asked a panel of sheriffs if they would “be willing to go to the maximum level to create consequences for these federal actors” whom he claimed had committed “seditious conspiracy.”

The response was less than promising.

Still, the potential for violence should not be discounted, according to Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and someone who has been monitoring the far right for more than three decades.

“It is certainly not out of the realm of possibility to see them using the office of the sheriff and posses they wish to create to start rounding up political opponents,” Burgart told Raw Story. “Right now, in the far right, the promotion of post-election violence and bloody political retribution has become disturbingly commonplace. In that context, the results of the election are almost an afterthought — only important in determining whether their murderous rage will have state sanction.”

While the far-right’s willingness to escalate may increase as the election approaches, at the time of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention in April, the two elected sheriffs on the panel were taking a cautious approach.

Sheriff Bob Songer from Klickitat County in Washington state told Raiklin that much as he might want to help, he doubted many prosecutors would be willing to press charges.

Sheriff Dar Leaf from Barry County in Michigan, put it more forcefully.

“We’re not going to be able to just go out and arrest,” he said. “We’ve got to do a grand jury indictment, just like the Constitution says.”

Leaf’s far-right credentials would seem to make him a prime candidate for Raiklin’s project. He gained national notoriety in 2020 when he suggested that members of an anti-government militia accused of attempting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer might have been trying to carry out a citizen’s arrest.

Leaf has falsely claimed that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and a lawyer representing Leaf reportedly sought evidence from an ad hoc group organized by lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn in December 2020 that could be used to justify “issuing probable cause warrants to sequester Dominion voting machines.”

But if Raiklin and his allies were discouraged by Leaf’s response at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, they haven’t given any indication of it.

During a podcast appearance with Mark Finchem, a former Arizona state representative who took part in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Raiklin said he was certain that the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association could help “identify which county sheriffs would be clamoring, clamoringto prosecute these scum.”

“I know one,” Finchem replied. “Dar Leaf in Barry County, Michigan.”

Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Leaf said that despite fielding a question from him at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, he doesn’t know who Raiklin is.

Leaf reiterated his rejection of Raiklin’s plan by expressing an aversion to politically motivated prosecutions.

Furthermore, Leaf warned that if indictments were obtained through grand juries “stacked” with Trump supporters, any criminal activity uncovered through depositions would be thrown out “because we started out breaking the law.”

Among dozens of other sheriff’s offices across the country contacted for this story, two in Wisconsin — Burnett County and Polk County — confirmed receiving an email with the subject heading: “Ivan Raiklin Requests Deputization of 80K Veterans” that linked to Raiklin’s video and encouraged them to get in contact.

“Please Watch this viral video that has garnered 9.8M views in 5 days,” it reads. “Important you understand. Remember your Oath.”

Raiklin’s name landed in one other sheriff’s inbox through a subscription to the “General Flynn Newsletter,” which is promoting the documentary about the former national security adviser.

The email, received by Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado in Oklahoma, describes Raiklin as a member of a team “hand-selected” by Flynn to provide event attendees “with an informative and unforgettable experience.”

The email describes the “General Flynn was Framed Evidence Wall,” a visual prop that Raiklin uses prior to each film screening that presents “an exhaustive timeline and link analysis of all the major political and government officials at the most senior levels that weaponized against General Flynn to prevent him from exposing their corruption.”

During his months-long campaign, Raiklin has continuously referenced Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in an effort to build credibility for his plan.

During his press conference with Treniss Evans in Detroit, Raiklin mentioned that the previous evening he’d “had a very long conversation with a guy by the name of Sheriff Mack” on the topic of “vetting and communicating with sheriffs.”

On a livestream of the press conference, Raiklin displayed a photo of the two men huddling over a laptop, suggesting a collaborative effort.

In a recent interview, Mack told Raw Story at the time that he had been “getting all sorts of calls” about Raiklin.

But since that meeting, Mack said he has soured on Raiklin’s plan.

“I’m afraid I don’t approve of some of his language, the hyperbole, the rhetoric,” Mack said.

For the same reason, Mack said, he resigned from the Oath Keepers. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right group that recruited from the ranks of retired law enforcement and military veterans, is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy at a federal prison in Cumberland, Md.

“It’s not where CSPOA can go,” Mack said, adding that he and Raiklin “are not working together at all.”

Since early June, Mack said that the two men have not spoken or exchanged any emails.

“Quite frankly, he talks about that list of 350 people — I’m sure they can afford lawyers,” Mack said. “It reeks of lawsuits, and it doesn’t follow due process.”

During his press conference with Evans, Raiklin said the two men are planning to attend the Sheriffs Association of Texas’ annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas, this month and pitch their plan.

“I would say that my inbox has been interesting lately with the amount of sheriffs that have an interest in seeing Texas uphold the United States Constitution, and preserve the way of life that we’ve come to expect as constitutionally guaranteed,” Evans said during the press conference.

But Mack said Raiklin’s score is currently 0.

“I know a lot of sheriffs, especially in Texas,” Mack told Raw Story. “I do not believe he has a single sheriff aligned with him. He’s never been able to give me a name.”

‘It’s so easy to learn where they live’

While cultivating relationships with members of Congress, lobbying sheriffs and recruiting volunteers to join posses tasked with detaining political enemies, Raiklin has also forged relationships with other extremists, seeming to cast about for a legal rationale in support of his scheme.

Over the past six months, Raiklin has appeared on at least three podcasts with Dr. Pete Chambers, who helped organize a “Take Our Border Back” convoy earlier this year to support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiance of the federal government.

Like Raiklin, Chambers is a retired lieutenant colonel who formerly served in the Army Special Forces. Following his retirement from the military and later, in 2022, from the National Guard, Chambers joined the “sovereign citizen” group, whose members shot a man and took him hostage in 1997.

Chambers said when he watched Raiklin’s viral video outlining his plan to carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against his “Deep State target list,” he recalled that he said to himself: “Ivan, you’ve just kicked open the door, and we’re going to have to back your play. And we can. And we’ve got the receipts to do it.”

During the conversation between the two men, Chambers referenced something called “the doctrine of lesser magistrates.” Although the term is rooted in the 16th century Protestant Reformation in Europe, it was more recently popularized by Matthew Trewhella, a Wisconsin pastor who has advocated killing abortion doctors.

Michael Flynn has recommended Trewhella’s 2013 book, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates: A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government,as “a masterful blueprint showing Americans how to successfully resist tyranny.”

Trewhella’s book also received a plug at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention where Raiklin attempted to sell the sheriffs on his “live-streamed swatting raids” plan.

Chambers seemed to acknowledge the improvisational nature of applying a 16th century religious doctrine to an ideological battle with Trump’s political adversaries in the United States of America in 2024.

“We’re building a plane and flying it here, I would say,” he said. “However, it is legal, moral and ethical…. If we can get together and develop the alliances of these sheriffs, then we decrease the space that these people can then maneuver.”

‘Gonna face those guns’

Next week, barring something cataclysmic, Trump will officially become the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee.

Trump will become the nominee despite being convicted of 34 felonies in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case in Manhattan, and he still faces dozens of additional federal and state charges despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that granted Trump — and any future president — immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts” they took as president.

Trump is as defiant as ever.

“I did nothing wrong. We’d have a system that was rigged and disgusting. I did nothing wrong,” Trump said June 27 in his debate against Biden.

On a parallel track, Raiklin’s embrace of lawlessness appears to be growing stronger.

In June, Raiklin published a 76-minute video of himself speaking with Cliven Bundy, a 78-year-old Nevada rancher who is perhaps the ultimate icon of the far-right anti-government movement. In 2014, Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management led to an armed standoff between the FBI and militia members, along with other supporters, including Richard Mack from the CSPOA.

Raiklin flattered Bundy during the exchange as “quite the legend,” while describing the federal government as “the most corrupt institution on the planet.” The two men agreed that “the militia” — a term used to describe armed citizens — “puts a check on the federal government.”

The rhetoric used by the two men became increasingly confrontational, with Bundy accusing the federal government of plotting to kill Americans. Cliven Bundy noted that his son, Ryan Bundy, was wounded, and a friend, LaVoy Finicum, was killed during a traffic stop during the Malheur National Forest occupation in Oregon in 2016.

“They don’t have those bullets to fight our enemy across the border,” Bundy charged. “They’ve got those bullets to kill us in America.”

Raiklin then quoted the Bible to suggest the proper response was “an eye for an eye.”

Bundy lamented that sheriffs across the country did not heed his call in 2014 for them to disarm federal agents in their jurisdictions.

“I said, ‘If you don’t disarm them, one of these days you’re going to face those guns,’” Bundy recounted.

“Now, we’re getting closer,” he quickly added. “Gonna face those guns.”

Raiklin, in response, appeared to advocate for doxing federal agents.

“Oh yeah, we’re not only going to do that,” he said. “Again, they’re going to experience the most peaceful, legal and moral, ethical and patriotic endeavor they’ve ever experienced in their life. Every one of them. Because we have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people that will facilitate them experiencing that.

“Because it’s so easy to learn where they live,” Raiklin continued. “Each one. Where their homes are. Who they’re related to. Where they frequent. What kinds of vehicles they own. What kinds of devices they own and that they emit GPS geo-tracking data. Which social media apps they use. We monitor all their communications.”

===

https://www.kunr.org/local-stories/2022-01-07/big-lie-feeds-off-western-extremism

...Many of the Republicans pushing Trump’s lies have close ties to anti-government extremists in the West.

Accountable.US,a left-leaning watchdog group, released a report Thursday connecting the insurrection with earlier conflicts over ranching and mining on federal lands, beginning with the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s.

“The anti-public lands movement is a breeding ground for this type of animosity that helped supercharge the events of January 6 and contribute to them,” Accountable spokesperson Karl Frisch said.

Frisch says far-right politicians like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert,Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar were primed for the insurrection by their previous involvement with anti-government extremists.

In December 2020, Reyes signed an amicus brief in support of a Supreme Court case seeking to have votes thrown out in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He is also the former chairman of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, one of the sponsors of the so-called March To Save America that took place just before protesters stormed the Capitol.

The fund also sponsored robocalls urging Trump supporters to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal” in the days before the insurrection. After the day’s attack turned deadly, Reyes sought to distance himself from the group.

Years earlier, as the Accountable report details, Reyes intervened on behalf of Cliven Bundy when the government planned to auction the radical rancher’s cattle in Utah to help pay down the $1 million in grazing fees he refused to pay. Bundy and his sons gained a large following among the far-right after they organized a series of armed standoffs with federal agents in Nevada and Oregon.

Frisch predicts the growth of right-wing radicalism will continue in the leadup to midterm elections later this year.

“Because these two movements are so intertwined, I think we’re likely to see more of it,” he said.

Meanwhile, advocates like Lyngar support abolishing the Electoral College and eliminating the filibuster, which would allow Democrats to pass federal voter protections. He told the crowd on Thursday it was up to voters to put pressure on lawmakers for those changes to be adopted....

ref

https://www.hcn.org/articles/a-look-back-at-the-first-sagebrush-rebellion

2016

"(The) Sagebrush (Rebellion) comes into relief as what it really is — a murky fusion of idealism and greed that may not be heroic, nor righteous, nor even intelligent. Only one certainty exists — that Sagebrush is a revolt against federal authority, and that its taproot grows deep in the century’s history. Beyond this, it is incoherent. Part hypocrisy, part demagoguery, partly the honest anger of honest people, it is a movement of confusion and hysteria and terrifyingly destructive potential. What it is no one fully understands. What it will do no one can tell.”

While that sounds like an observation from 2016, perhaps nodding toward the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon by the radical fringe of the latest incarnation of the Sagebrush Rebellion, this passage was actually written in 1982 by then-Colorado Governor Richard Lamm.

He referred to the first of three distinct Sagebrush Rebellions of modern times*: The first flared up in the mid- to late-1970s; the second occurred in the mid-1990s; and the third began not long after President Obama was elected in 2008. Though the first rebellion had ebbed by the early 1980s, and accomplished none of its big national legislative goals, it did leave a lasting imprint on the West. Here are the big takeaways of that first wave:

What sparked it: Many miners, loggers and ranchers of the West were rebelling against “federal colonialism” that came in the form of environmental laws, from the Wilderness Act to the Endangered Species Act to, especially, the Federal Land Policy Management Act. Passed in 1976, FLPMA shifted the Bureau of Land Management’s mandate from one of maximizing extraction from public lands, to preserving — at least to a limited extent — those same lands. To critics, it locked in the “absentee landlord” relationship Washington had with much of the West.

To the rebels, President Jimmy Carter was an especially onerous landlord. On the one hand he tried to cut off funding to a slate of federal water projects pending throughout the West (thus depriving the region of its lifeblood), and on the other wanted to turn large portions of the region into an MX missile launching pad (cutting off other access to that land and making us a target for the Soviet Union). While Lamm wouldn’t exactly count himself as a Sagebrush Rebel, he also revolted against the federal landlord when Carter and Congress implemented an $88 billion synfuels subsidy program that led to water-guzzling, destructive oil shale development in the Interior West.

Who were the rebels: The movement had many layers, from local politicians and entire boards of county commissioners, to state legislators and even U.S. congressmen. The leaders included San Juan County, Utah, Commissioner and uranium miner Cal Black — the model for Edward Abbey’s antagonist Bishop Love in his novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang” — Nevada state legislator Dean Rhoads, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch, from Utah, and a handful of other politicians, mostly from Nevada and Idaho.

Hatch, Black and Sens. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and Ted Stevens, R-Ak., headed up the League for the Advancement of States Equal Rights, or LASER, the biggest and most influential rebel organization. The Idaho-based Sagebrush Rebellion,Inc., also touted a large membership. Funding for these groups came mostly from the extractive industry; the Rebellion was hardly a pure grassroots movement. The closest analogues in today’s movement would probably be the corporate-sponsored, right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Lands Council.

What did they want: Quite simply, they wanted more local control over the land that surrounded them, therefore gaining more control over their own destiny. Some wanted to transfer federal lands to the state, others were okay with the land remaining under the federal umbrella, as long as they got more say in how the feds managed the land. In most cases, this would mean fewer regulations. 

[pix see sagebrush

Ronald Reagan supported the Sagebrush Rebels' cause, and they supported him. This appeared in High Country News in 1980.

High Country News

What actions did the rebels take on the ground: They sure as heck didn’t show up, armed to the teeth, and take over a federal facility, or face down federal officials with assault rifles. But there was violence, or at least threats thereof. In 1979, Black told BLM officials that he was to the point “where I’ll blow up bridges, ruins and vehicles. We’re going to start a revolution.” Black never delivered on his promises, but there was widespread vandalism of ancient Puebloan sites in Utah that appeared to be politically motivated. And in 1980, the Grand County, Utah, commissioners led a group of hundreds of locals in bulldozing a road into a Wilderness Study Area in protest of what they saw as a BLM land grab. No one was prosecuted.

On a political level: The first Sagebrush Rebellion was mostly waged in state legislatures, where a number of bills were considered in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Alaska, Oregon and Arizona, demanding the transfer of federal lands to the states. (Those early bills were mirrored in 2012 and 2013 in Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Montana and Utah). Hatch also introduced a bill in the Senate that would have allowed state land commissions to take over some 600 million acres of public lands nationwide. Meanwhile, LASER actively courted 1980 presidential candidateRonald Reagan, who declared himself a rebel.

What happened: Reagan’s election, and the appointment of property-rights advocate James Watt as Secretary of Interior, defused the rebellion. Watt didn’t go for wholesale federal land transfers to the states, but he and his cohorts rolled back regulations and pledged to incorporate more local say into federal land management. There was suddenly far less to rebel against, at least for the extractive industries and their allies.

Meanwhile, consensus among what was left of the Rebellion fell apart. Even many of the Rebellion's leaders understood that state-level land transfer bills were symbolic and had no real legal basis, so they'd get shot down by the courts thanks to the property and supremacy clauses of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Light v. United States. A congressional bill like Hatch's might make it through the courts if it passed, but the chances of that were slim to none.

Besides, when the costs of such transfers were revealed, they didn't seem so great.A study by the Interior Department found that states could end up losing millions of dollars if they were to similarly manage the land and reap the same revenues from it as the feds did. Also, the Payments in Lieu of Taxes program, or PILT, was just kicking in at that time. Under the program, the feds pay counties in order to make up for property taxes that the counties can’t collect from public lands — that money would be lost if the state took over the land. 

Many ranchers and miners had second thoughts about the states taking over federal land, as well. Hardrock miners have nearly unfettered access to federal lands and have to pay no royalties for the minerals they extract. Oil and gas drillers pay low royalties, and ranchers get a prime deal for grazing on BLM lands. They were worried they’d lose those deals under state management — royalties and grazing fees for state lands can be 50 percent higher or more than for federal lands. 

As governor, Lamm occasionally sided with the Rebels. But he came to see the Rebellion as a fool's errand. In “The Angry West,” he wrote: “… by asserting, even flaunting, a regional independence that never existed, the proud West becomes the foolish West. Worse, by continuing to act today as though it still has no need for the federal government, even as it continues to profit from federal largesse, it compounds its hypocrisy and undermines its credibility.”

Aftermath: While the regional, state-level Rebellion faded after 1981, it just kept on flaring up at the local level, particularly in parts of Nevada and Utah. Black didn’t stop fighting until his death in 1990, and by then the next iteration — Sagebrush Rebellion Part II — was about to ignite.

*There has long been resentment toward the federal land agencies in the West, which gave rise to rebellions here and there prior to 1970. One of the early major such uprising was in the late 1800s, and mostly played out in Colorado. 

Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor of High Country News. Follow @jonnypeace

ref 2

PRESS RELEASE // JANUARY 6, 2022

REPORT: Insurrectionists, Anti-Conservation Movement One in the Same

Washington, D.C. — The anti-government extremism that fueled the insurrection on January 6, 2021 aligns almost perfectly with the violent opposition to public lands conservation, a new report from the nonpartisan watchdog Accountable.US found. 

Anti-government extremists who want to end public ownership of land and water have infiltrated the halls of power from county commissioners all the way to the United States Congress, according to the report which can be downloaded :{HERE:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:. Those same leaders and their allies in groups such as the Oath Keepers have been on the front lines of the attempt to overturn the 2020 Election and undermine democracy based on Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.”  

“It is time to call opposition to conservation what it truly is: an attack on American democracy,” said Kyle Herrig, President of Accountable.US. “The movement to end public ownership of land is almost identical to the movement to overrule the public’s right to choose who leads the country.”  

Key findings from the report reveal the far-reaching connections between anti-public lands and anti-democracy leaders and groups:

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:{Read the full analysis. :(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/bundy/ nor ca water

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/ammon-bundy-is-building-a-far-right-theocratic-army-under-the-guise-of-defending-rights/

There's been a buffoonish quality to Ammon Bundy's brand of far-right "constitutionalist" politics over the past six months, primarily organized in a typically paranoid response to COVID-19-related public-health measures: Protesting at the home of a police officer who had arrested an anti-vaccination fanatic for violating the closure of a playground. Trying to bully his way inside a health-board meeting. Getting arrested twice in two days for ignoring his ban from the Idaho Statehouse. Going maskless at a Caldwell High School football game that forced the game to be called off, for which he was not only ejected but banned from future games by the local school district.

The endless antics, however, have always obfuscated a darker, much more dangerous agenda. A disturbing new in-depth report by Devin Burghart at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights reveals that all the time that Bundy has been gathering media time and headlines, he's been building a massive army of volunteers—a network called People's Rights—intent on imposing a far-right authoritarian state, all under the guise of defending individual rights.

Bundy first announced the formation of the People's Rights network in March, when he held a gathering not far from his home in Emmett, Idaho, discussing plans to organize people to form ad-hoc gatherings to "defend" local citizens against COVID-19-related "tyranny." Bundy told the audience that they didn't need to obey the governor's stray-at-home or business-closure orders. And he pledged to bring fellow "Patriots" to the rescue if anyone felt pressure from "authorities" to comply.

"I will be there," Bundy told the *Idaho Press*. "I will bring as many people as we can. We will form a legal defense for you, a political defense for you, and we will also, if necessary, provide a physical defense for you, so that you can continue in your rights."

As it has played out on the ground, these gatherings have become bellicose, and frequently armed, mobs protesting police officers at their homes, breaking into health-board meetings that were being held online, and breaking down the doors inside the Statehouse and attending committee meetings unmasked in order to intimidate state legislators.

The incident resulting in the cancellation of the football game between Caldwell and Emmett high schools is emblematic of these anti-democratic intimidation tactics at work.

Bundy, whose son plays for Emmett High, showed up in Caldwell for the game without a mask—though one was required for entry—and refused to put one on, first taking a seat in the stands, then moving to a fenced area away from the stands. As he livestreamed the exchange, Bundy refused to leave when game officials asked him to.

Moreover, members of his network watching on Facebook sprang into action and began phoning 911 dispatchers in Caldwell—not merely to complain, but to threaten and intimidate. The flood of threats was so overwhelming and worrisome that at halftime, officials announced the game was being cancelled.

"The threats made to dispatch appear to have stemmed from the dispute between Mr. Bundy and the Caldwell School District personnel that requested he wear a mask while attending the game," a Caldwell police spokesman told the Idaho Statesman. "The calls did specifically reference the football game."

Ten days later, the district voted unanimously to ban Bundy from Caldwell school grounds for the next year.

The IREHR report explores how this is all being organized. The People's Rights network, it explains, has seen rapid growth fueled by "a fusion of Bundy's core of the far-right paramilitary supporters built up over years of armed standoffs with a mass base of new activists radicalized in protest over COVID-19 health directives."

Bundy devised a secure online system built on SMS text messaging to enable the network to organize without public scrutiny or exposure. IREHR managed to obtain access to the network, however, and reports that "Bundy has assembled a team of 153 'assistants' in sixteen states." It goes on to identify all of those people, and found that their backgrounds include significant activism in radical right causes—and that, somewhat unusually, the majority of those local assistants are women (though the national and state leadership remain dominated by men).

This network is not engaged in the usual far-right battle against "government tyranny," which is the usual rhetoric that surrounds "Patriot" groups. Bundy's network instead is pro-government—but one that has no compunction about erasing the rights of people its participants have deemed morally depraved:

Instead of a more traditional "anti-government" narrative, People's Rights leaders have expressed a desire for governmental power to be used to protect the "righteous" against "wicked" liberals, antifa, Black Lives Matter activists, and others. Several People's Rights leaders are running for elected office—to become the government. Absent that sort of intervention, leaders have proposed a type ofarmed enclave-style "neighborhood" nationalism, where "righteous" neighbors stand against the "wicked." People's Rights leaders have often defined the "wicked" using far-right conspiracism, racism, antisemitism, anti-indigenous, and anti-transgender sentiment.

Moreover, in addition to building an "Uber-like" paramilitary response system that can be mobilized whenever people believe their rights are under attack from godless liberals, IREHR's report explains that discussion within the surreptitious network go well beyond such imagined "self-defense" measures.

Some of the People's Rights network participants are running for elective office, hoping to promote the group's theocratic-state agenda from within the halls of power. Mario Perea, a People's Rights assistant from Idaho, told would-be participants in a rally for a political candidate: "We claim, and we use, and we defend our rights. In order to defend our rights, we have to get people into these government positions. That is a form of defense because we're being attacked politically. So we need to fight back and resist politically."

The politics include a sensibility attuned to modern "Patriot" movement rhetoric, particularly the rising "Boogaloo" talk about broad social breakdowns and violence surrounding the coming election. Mostly, there is a fairly typical eagerness for the battle to begin.

"Are you ready for Civil War November 4?" asked People's Rights leader Tony Pellegrino in a Facebook post.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ammon-bundys-anti-antics-earn-him-2-ejections-from-idaho-statehouse-in-2-days

if there is one thing we already know about Ammon Bundy, it’s that he’s anointed himself the arbiter of all things constitutional and legal—which is why he’s so frequently inclined to ignore the laws he considers “unlawful,” including the federal government’s ownership of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, as well as the efforts of Idaho’s governor to clamp down on the COVID-19 pandemic.

And it’s why he was arrested twice in two days for his obstreperous attempts to lead a “people’s rights” revolt against Idaho state leadership during the opening days of a special legislative session intended to deal with pandemic-related state business. After leading a rowdy crowd of protesters on Monday who pushed past state troopers, broke a glass door and filled both legislative galleries and committee-hearing rooms beyond social-distancing requirements, Bundy was arrested Tuesday (and banned for a year from the Statehouse) for refusing to leave a hearing room—and then arrested again Wednesday for ignoring the ban.

Both arrest scenes were notable for Bundy’s passive non-cooperation, leading to state troopers carting him out the door on the same wheeled chair in which he sat in the meeting room after he refused to leave on Tuesday—and then somewhat repeating the scene Wednesday, with Bundy first being bodily dragged out of the legislative chambers and then being wheeled out of the building in a wheelchair.

No one was arrested after Monday’s riotous opening. However, on Tuesday, Bundy and a cluster of his anti-state-of-emergency supporters flooded another committee hearing in the Lincoln Auditorium of the Statehouse—and became so raucous that legislators cancelled the hearing and moved the hearing to another location.

bundy and his cohorts had occupied the section of the hearing room normally reserved for members of the press, and afterwards, they chose to remain—and then refused to leave when state officials attempted to close the room. So a large phalanx of Idaho State Troopers marched into the room, ordered everyone still present out, and then arrested Bundy and two of his supporters when they refused to leave their seats.

Bundy was rolled out of the building in the office chair, with his hands bound behind his back. He was released shortly afterwards at the Ada County Courthouse, and informed that as a result of his arrest, he was banned from the Statehouse for a year, and would be considered to be trespassing if he attempted to return.

Republican House Speaker Scott Bedke condemned the incident: “The events that have taken place over the past couple of days are unacceptable. It is important to protect the rights of all to participate in the process, not simply those who are the most aggressive and have the loudest voices,” Bedke said in a press release. “Unfortunately, a small group of individuals have disrupted what should be a deliberate and fair process. The end result has been chaotic and unproductive.”

Still Bedke was optimistic, saying he hoped legislators could get back to work “without further distractions.”

Instead, Bundy showed back up again on Wednesday, seated this time with a group of supporters in the gallery of the Senate chambers—utterly indifferent to the warning against trespassing he had received the day before. Security officers and ISP officials confronted him, asked him to leave, and when he refused, arrested him.

This time, he was carried out bodily to a secured area, then apparently placed in a wheelchair and taken out of the Statehouse again through an underground tunnel and put in a police vehicle.

Bundy has taken the lead role in organizing right-wing extremists’ “resistance” to Gov. Brad Little’s stay-at-home orders and other anti-pandemic measures. So far, he has organized an Easter celebration that defied the state’s social-distancing rules, helped promote an “anti-vaccination” mother’s attempt to make a martyr of herself by ignoring the shutdown of a Meridian playground, and tried to bully his way inside a district health-board meeting that was actually being held online.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cheering-rogue-sheriffs-connected-extremist-group

faux  News is cheering on rogue sheriffs who refuse to enforce shelter-in-place or social distancing orders that they claim are unconstitutional. Three of these sheriffs who have appeared on the network also have ties to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an extremist, pro-militia group.

While protests to the stay-at-home orders cropped up across the country, sheriffs in several states have insisted that enforcing the orders would violate people’s constitutional rights. According to the Miami Herald, Sheriff J.D. Raymond in Washington state said he will not enforce any guidelines that he believes “infringe on your constitutional rights.” Four sheriffs in Michigan issued a statement that sympathized with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desire to protect the public, but concluded her orders are “overstepping her executive authority” and said they therefore will not enforce them.

Fox News has interviewed several sheriffs who refuse to enforce these measures, asking if the orders have gone “too far” and if people are just “standing up” for their rights. (Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade agreed that Michigan’s orders are “unreasonable,” and Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity went as far as to call the orders “draconian” and praised the places that are starting to ease restrictions.)

Three of the sheriffs Fox spoke to -- Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona; Dar Leaf of Barry County, Michigan; and Ted Schendel of Benzie County, Michigan -- have ties to the extremist groupConstitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA).

CSPOA was founded by Richard Mack, a former rural Arizona sheriff and one of Southern Poverty Law Center’s top radical, anti-government leaders. According to SPLC, Mack’s website warns that “the greatest threat we face today is not terrorists; it is our federal government” and calls the IRS “Gestapo.” His group ascribes to a theory that county sheriffs are the “highest legitimate law enforcement” in the United States, as SPLC put it, and that they should not enforce laws that they deem to violate people’s constitutional rights.

Mack made headlines in 2014 when he told Fox News there was a plan to put women on the frontlines in a Nevada standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. While he admitted his plan “sounds horrible,” he insisted it was the only way to show how ruthless federal agents are. He was also one of the most ardent supporters during the 41-day standoff at an Oregon wildlife refuge led by Bundy's son in 2016 and openly admitted he hoped his support would boost the visibility of CSPOA.

Now Fox is interviewing these CSPOA-associated sheriffs about their opposition to the stay-at-home orders.

==

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cf pendejo

ew 120

The letter writers also raised concerns about Pendley's actions and opinions in and out of office.

  1. In November, he publicly expressed support for the views of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an extremist public lands organization affiliated with armed militants Ammon and Cliven Bundy.
  2. He has variousconflicts of interests. He represented three Utah counties in their attempt to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and still receives payments from former-employer the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which is still suing the BLM.
  3. He is overseeing a controversial move of the BLM headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado that has not been approved by Congress.
  4. He holds controversial views. In addition to arguing in support of selling off public lands, he also thinks that wild horses are the biggest issue facing Western public lands, ignoring issues like fossil fuel extraction and the climate crisis, the fate of the endangered greater sage-grouse and Gunnison sage-grouse and overgrazing by livestock.

"Putting someone like William Perry Pendley in charge of what happens on these public lands is likely to just accelerate climate disruption," Shelley Silbert, letter signatory and executive director of conservation group Great Old Broads for Wilderness, told InsideClimate News.

The Interior Department dismissed the concerns of the letter writers.

"For this group of environmental extremists to call themselves sportsman and conservationists is as laughable as this letter. Mr. Pendley brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Department and is committed to carrying out the Administration's priorities for the betterment of the American people," an Interior spokesperson told The Hill Monday.

But environmental groups argue that Pendley's positions are the extreme ones.

"William Perry Pendley is an ideological zealot with values that are deeply out of touch with the mainstream," Wilderness Society conservation director Phil Hanceford

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no lnx

How the bizarre tale of the ‘Oregon standoff’ explains what happened to America in 2016

Written by Andrew O'Hehir / Salon September 8, 2019

Anthony McCann’s “Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff” is one of those extraordinary books that seems to be about one thing, and turns out to be about almost everything. I raved to people a lot while I was reading it, drawing unwise comparisons to “Moby-Dick” and “Beyond Good and Evil.”

I’m still somewhat OK with those analogies. But rather than going deep on the lit-crit, I would more soberly suggest that “Shadowlands” belongs on the shelf beside Peter Matthiessen’s “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” or Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” as a work of political nonfiction that isn’t really “political,” at least not in the narrow, normative use of that word.

McCann is a poet and writing teacher who lives in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, and was drawn into the now-half-forgotten story of the 2016 “Oregon standoff” by his interest in the geography of the West, Native American messianic spirituality and the way those things intersect with the uniquely American theology of the Latter-day Saints. (Who have officially requested that we no longer call them the Mormons: Everybody gets a safe space.)

I want to let my fascinating conversation with McCann tell most of the story, but let’s just say that whatever you think you know about the Oregon standoff — when a handful of libertarian loons, associated with the notorious Bundy family of Nevada and drawn together by the internet, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the remote desert of southeastern Oregon — is probably wrong. The Malheur occupiers relied on a thoroughly nutty interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and most of them came from the fringes of the far right. But they weren’t white supremacists, mostly weren’t gun-totin’ militia types (except for a few hangers-on), and never resorted to violence or even seriously threatened to do so.

You don’t have to agree with anything about the occupiers’ understanding of America or God or freedom — and McCann certainly doesn’t — to agree that they were responding to something real: a notionally democratic state that has lost much of its popular legitimacy, and a civil society that often feels unmoored or uprooted. Something else, of course, also happened in 2016, andMcCann’s book becomes an inadvertent chronicle of the weird stew of discontent, on social media and IRL, that led to the election of our current president.

If the Oregon standoff provided an early warning of what would happen in November of that year, it wasn’t exactly in the way you might think. Many of the Malheur occupiers vigorously despised Donald Trump as a statist or authoritarian strongman, and Trumpism wound up dividing their quadrant of the right just as it broke apart the old Republican Party. Ammon Bundy, the movement’s charismatic leader, eventually wound up breaking with Trump’s version of conservative politics entirely,endorsing asylum for Central American refugees and the abolition or devolution of the federal prison system.

Yeah, the deeper you go the weirder it gets, and you’ll want to keep reading “Shadowlands” not just for McCann’s remarkable powers of description and narrative sympathy, but in hopes he can explain not just what has gone wrong in America but why.

[quite long]

https://www.rawstory.com/2016/02/koch-backed-lobbying-group-is-spreading-ammon-bundys-lies-misspellings-and-all/

Koch-funded lobbying group is helping Ammon Bundy, the jailed Oregon militant leader, spread misleading information about federal land management agencies.

The American Lands Council, which promotes legislation that would give states and individuals control of federally owned land, posted a video on Facebook accusing the Bureau of Land Management of deliberately starting fires and allowing them to burn out of control.

The ALC video was ripped off from a misleading and “heavily edited propaganda video” that Bundy produced in December, reported columnist Paul Rolly, of the Salt Lake Tribune.

Rolly said the videos were so similar that the ALC’s text repeated the same spelling errors made by Bundy, among 16 militants indicted last week in federal court in connection with the ongoing takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Preserve.

According to news reports and BLM investigators, the Oregon fire described in the video was actually caused by lightning, fueled by unusually dry weather and fought by firefighters from federal, state and local agencies.

But Bundy, and then the ALC, misrepresented claims made by John Witzel, an Oregon rancher who criticized the BLM’s efforts to fight the wildfire, to claim federal agents were intentionally “burning out ranchers.”

The columnist said research by an Oregon horse breeder showed firefighters had intentionally set smaller fires to starve the raging wildfire of fuel.

“What you see in the video are firefighting efforts — including the use of backfiring, which involves intentionally burning land ahead of a wildfire in order to create a black line devoid of fuel for the wildfire — not thuggery by the yellow-clad stormtroopers of the tyrannical BLM,” said Michael Heggen, the horse breeder.

The 40-year-old Bundy remains jailed — but he’s still trying to direct an uprising against the federal government.

Bundy released a statement recorded Saturday asking lawmakers in eight states to visit him and other jailed militants as a show of support, reported *The Oregonian*.

“This is a call to action for any elected representative in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, the state of Washington and Ohio,” Bundy said. “You have constituents in federal custody. Please visit and contact them to voice your support for free speech, the right to assemble and civil disobedience.”

Four militants remain holed up at the wildlife refuge nearly two weeks after Bundy and other occupation leaders were arrested during a surprise traffic stop on their way to meet with residents of another Oregon county.

One of the most prominent militants, LaVoy Finicum, was shot and killed by officers after attempting to drive around a roadblock.

Possibly dozens of militants fled in the hours after the arrests and killing, but the four holdouts say they won’t leave until they’re killed.

One of the holdouts, 27-year-old David Fry, released a series of videos Sunday taunting federal authorities as “low-life scumbags” and asking like-minded “patriots” to engage in violence against their political enemies.

“They don’t believe in guns, so we don’t have to worry about them,” Fry said in one video. “They don’t have guns, they’re stupid.”

Fry expressed what appears to be anger at liberal critics and state governments that removed Confederate memorials and flags.

“So instead of letting these guys verbally abuse us, you know — going down and trashing down memorials, you know, things like that, it’s time to take a stand, it’s time to fight, it’s time to show these scumbags who’s really in charge of the country,” Fry said.

Bundy has called for Fry and the other three holdouts to go home, but they resisted an attempt by militia groups who offered to help them leave the wildlife refuge without being arrested.

The jailed Bundy portrayed himself as a political prisoner, and he asked lawmakers to show support and press for his release.

“It is your duty to hold federal agencies at bay, protecting the people in your state,” Bundy said. “And to those who disagree with my speech, or our civil disobedience, and may dislike our ideas regarding that the land belongs to the people: Please remember that you do not want free speech to be retaliated against by government officials. If you do not advocate for government to tolerate ideas that it hates, then the First Amendment and free speech mean nothing.”

“Arm yourself with ideas,” he added. “Arm yourselves with education. Argue and disagree. Be free. Thank you.”

The militants were visited during their occupation last month by at least six Republican lawmakers, and another longtime ally called to express her support.

Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) was not among the visitors, but he founded the ALC and successfully urged lawmakers in his state to pass the 2012 Transfer of Public Lands Act.

...

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/up-in-arms-new-book-2638990950.html

Tara Lohan

When armed militants with a grudge against the federal government seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon back in the winter of 2016, I remember avoiding the news coverage. Part of me wanted to know what was happening, but each report I read — as the occupation stretched from days to weeks and the destruction grew — made me so angry it was hard to keep reading.

That's why I picked up John Temple's new book Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America's Patriot Militia Movement.

I wanted to see what I'd missed. And I wanted to understand the extremist ideologies that continue to dominate many discussions in the American West.

Temple, an author and journalism professor at West Virginia University's Reed College of Media, provides a page-turning account of both the 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, that launched scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and his family into the national spotlight and the 2016 occupation of Malheur, led by Bundy's sons Ammon and Ryan.

"It's obviously an exciting story with cowboys and guns and takeovers and standoffs," Temple told me about the book. "But it sheds light on public lands issues, environmental issues, on questions about how the government should handle these situations and the urban-rural divide in this country."

The book also delves into the history of the Sagebrush Rebellion,a western U.S. movement against federal ownership of public lands that ignited in the late 1970s and has continued to smolder in the decades since.

The Bundys, who still subscribe to this line of thinking, refused to recognize the Bureau of Land Management's authority over the public land where they graze their cattle (or the federal government in general). That ultimately led — after 20 years of federal agencies looking the other way — to an armed standoff in which the FBI attempted to seize the rancher's cattle after years of unpaid grazing fees and mounting fines.

Spoiler alert: It didn't end well for the government.

Temple then chronicles the play's second act, during which the Bundy sons engineered the takeover of the federally run Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for more than a month. The pretense was defending local Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were sentenced to jail for federal land arson, but who actually eschewed the Bundys' help. The occupation turned out to be more of a publicity stunt than anything — one that ended in spectacular failure (although the Bundys insist it was a success). In the process they also trashed the refuge headquarters and racked up a $9 million tab for taxpayers.

While Up in Arms gives a detailed view of the ideology that motivates the Bundys, the story is much bigger than them. It's also an exploration of the motivations of some of the most hardline anti-federal militants in the country — not just the Bundys, but the ragbag collection of so-called Patriot movement followers that flocked to their ranch, even when most of them lacked understanding of public-lands issues and the cause they were backing.

In fact, Temple said, he first came to the story of the Bundys researching an unrelated project about militias. As a result there's not much in the book about the underlying environmental issues at the heart of the Bundy actions, including the impact of renegade ranching on public lands.

But Temple writes about the personal histories of many of the supporters who turned up for the initial showdown in Bunkerville and others who joined the occupation at Malheur. He reveals the power dynamics among different Patriot militia groups as they jockeyed for media attention and acolytes.

While the Bundys honed their talking points in scores of interviews about their anti-government rhetoric and their calling from God to act on it, Temple said that most of the other Bundy supporters didn't have much political inspiration or well-formed ideologies.

"I think some of these folks were motivated on a very personal level where they have trouble with authority and that kind of thing," he said. "Every individual seemed to have a different set of grievances or issues that were driving them, but it coalesced around a few things:Distrust of the federal government and the feeling that the federal government was overreaching in its authority, and the Second Amendment."

What could go wrong?

As Temple writes, a lot went wrong on both sides of the confrontation between the government and the militias. This was on full view when the Bundys and their compatriots eventually faced their day in court.

If you've ever wondered, as I did, how the leaders of an armed insurrection that occupied federal property, degraded public lands, and terrorized government workers escaped punishment, it's explained here in great detail. Temple writes about not just the court proceedings that followed the standoffs but the main players on the federal government's team, including FBI leadership involved in Bunkerville. A series of bumbles and missteps ultimately led to the prosecution's ultimate failure.

There's no happy ending, unless you believe divine providence is shining down on the Bundy clan. But Temple's book paints a useful picture of the simmering, ongoing range war in the West and the havoc an unlikely alliance of right-wing groups can wreak when they converge.

That's the most sobering part of the book: It's likely a preview of things to come. RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB...https://www.amazon.com/Up-Arms-Hijacked-Outfoxed-Government/dp/1946885959...Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed ... ›...sjpl oathkeepers

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==

https://thinkprogress.org/the-bundy-familys-odd-mormon-connection-explained-a41f75ad7b60/

News broke over the weekend that a group of armed militiamen commandeered a federal building housed in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, an action they said was meant to protest the conviction of two local ranchers found guilty of setting fire to federal land. Media outlets were quick to note the group’s leaders included Ammon Bundy, the son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who staged a similar standoff with the U.S. government in 2014 when he refused to remove his cattle from federal land. The family, it seemed, was rapidly becoming heroes of a national — and increasingly militant — anti-government moment.

But while the Nevada standoff and the armed Oregon occupation is often framed by pundits and politicians as a dispute over the role of government, the Bundy family also appears to be influenced by something else: their Mormon faith.

Granted, it would be a mistake to call the Bundy’s armed campaign against the government a “Mormon movement,” as some of their supporters do not share their faith and the Mormon church has condemned the Oregon occupation. Also, thousands of Mormons, or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), serve proudly in the U.S. military, not to mention the U.S. government.

But religion has undoubtedly played a key role in the lives and activism of the Bundys, as well as many of their passionate — and often armed — supporters. To fully understand those staring down government agents in Oregon, you first have to unpack their faith — and why their church rejects it.

The Bundy family claims a Mormon faith as inspiration for their cause…

As John Sepulvado pointed out over at OPD, Cliven Bundy repeatedly cited his Mormonism to justify his standoff with the United States government in 2014, insisting he has a right to graze cattle on federal land because his Mormon ancestors worked it long before the federal Bureau of Land Management was established.

“If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us?” Bundy said. “Could those people that stood (with me) without fear and went through that spiritual experience … have done that without the Lord being there? No, they couldn’t.”

Bundy even said that God inspired him to resist and “disarm” federal agents, arguing that failing to do so would result in civil war.

If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us?

“I have no idea what God wants done, but he did inspire me to have the sheriffs across the United States take away these weapons, disarm these bureaucracies, and he also gave me a little inspiration on what would happen if they didn’t do that,” Bundy said while speaking on the radio program KUER later that year. “It was indicated that ‘this is our chance, America, to straighten this problem up. If we don’t solve this problem this way, we will face these same guns in a civil war.’”

Bundy’s family reportedly:{ fasted and prayed for the “spirit of their forefathers to be with them” during the 2014 incident, and Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, articulated a similar vision to explain his involvement in the recent takeover in Oregon. In a }video:{posted on January 1, }::{Ammon — whose name is the same as a famous figure from the Book of Mormon — explained that it was God who called him to leave his home and campaign on behalf of the Hammond family in Oregon.}:

“I clearly understood that the Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds,” Ammon said in between various references to prayer. He also reflected on God guiding him through the process: “It was exactly like it was happening at the Bundy ranch, when we were guided and directed as to what we were supposed to do…[Our plan is] wisdom in the Lord…And I ask you now to come participate in this wonderful thing in Harney County that the Lord is about to accomplish.”

Other Mormons have responded to the Bundys’ call to action. Several militia members who participated in the Nevada standoff quoted Mormon scripture and waved Mormon flags, for instance, and members of the Oregon occupation are already making references to Mormon religious figures.

…But the Mormon church doesn’t agree.

The LDS Church was mostly silent during the 2014 standoff, when Cliven Bundy told reporters that he “never had a problem with the bishop” regarding the dispute. On Monday, however, officials released a statement strongly condemning the Oregon occupation.

“While the disagreement occurring in Oregon about the use of federal lands is not a Church matter, Church leaders strongly condemn the armed seizure of the facility and are deeply troubled by the reports that those who have seized the facility suggest that they are doing so based on scriptural principles,” the statement read. “This armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis. We are privileged to live in a nation where conflicts with government or private groups can — and should — be settled using peaceful means, according to the laws of the land.”

Indeed, most members of the LDS church have a deep, abiding respect for the U.S. government — especially the Constitution, which the church sees as divinely inspired. In addition, the 12th article of faith for LDS members compels them to obey governmental authority, saying, “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”

The Bundys may be influenced by a distinctly Mormon style of Libertarianism

Regardless of the church’s current position, the Bundys’ rejection of the federal government mirrors that of many non-Mormons within the political right, but it might also originate from their faith. According to Matthew Bowman, a historian and author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith, the family’s political beliefs appear to reflect the theology of two prominent (and politically active) 20th-century Mormons:Ezra Taft Benson, former Secretary of Agriculture under president Dwight D. Eisenhower and the 13th president of the LDS Church, and Cleon Skousen, an influential Mormon political thinker and theologian. Bowman told ThinkProgress that both men forged a Libertarian approach to politics based on their religious beliefs.

“There is an important concept in Mormonism called free agency,” Bowman said. “Mormons don’t believe in original sin, so everyone is on this earth to choose how to live their lives, which [ to Benson and Skousen, was] with maximum possible individual liberty.”

The Bundys very closely link their Mormonism to conspiratorial Libertarianism.

“For Benson and Skousen, essentially we need to live in a Libertarian society for liberty to be effective,” he said, noting that Skousen is often lauded by conservative pundit and Mormon Glenn Beck, who called his book The 5,000 Year Leap “divinely inspired.”

The political concept is decidedly fringe within modern-day Mormonism, but Bowman acknowledged that “there remains a cadre of mormons who are very much followers of his idea.” He pointed to websites such as the “LDS Freedom Forum,” where Mormons vigorously debate right-wing Libertarian ideas on a number of message boards.

“A lot of people cheering for Bundy on that website right now,” he said, adding, “the Bundys very closely link their Mormonism to conspiratorial Libertarianism.”

Ammon Bundy appeared to envision this kind of Libertarian utopia when outlining his plan for the Oregon occupation. GHOST DANCE BUT WITH ASSAULT RIFLES]

“While we’re here, what we’re going to be doing is freeing these lands up, getting the ranchers back to ranching,getting the miners back to mining, getting the loggers back to logging, where they can do it under the protection of the people — and not be afraid of this tyranny that has been upon them,” Bundy said.

Bowman didn’t draw a direct connection between the family’s specific land-use ideas and Mormon theology, but noted that it was “a kind of radical localism” that “echoes of the Mormon settlement in the West.”

Militia members and Bundy supporters are pointing to Mormon scripture to justify their actions

AMMON BUNDY SPEAKS AT A RALLY ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF CLIVEN BUNDY’S STAND AGAINST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. THE FLAG THAT WAVES BESIDE HIM IS THE “TITLE OF LIBERTY,” A MORMON FLAG. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/JOHN LOCHER

As other writers have already pointed out, one of the gun-toting militants holed up on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is refusing to identify himself as anything other than“Captain Moroni.” The cryptic name is a direct reference to Captain Moroni from the Book of Mormon, an important religious figure who is remembered for resisting a tyrannical government. According to scripture, Moroni rose to power when a group of dissenters tried to establish their leader Amalickiah as king over the captain’s people, the Nephites. Moroni became so outraged that he tore off his clothing, wrote a slogan on it, and fashioned it into a flag, using it to rally his army and drive out Amalickiah’s forces.

“And it came to pass that [Moroni] rent his coat; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it — In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children — and he fastened it upon the end of a pole,” the scripture reads.

Moroni killed any dissenters who did not flee, and his banner, now known as the “Title of Liberty,” was raised over every Nephite tower. Similarly, flags bearing Moroni’s slogan “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children” were waved by Bundy supporters and militia members at a rally last summer in Nevada, when the family organized an event to mark the anniversary of the rancher’s refusal to comply with federal laws.

“Captain Moroni is the prototypical Mormon defender for freedom of worship and freedom of liberty,” Bowman said.

Although the LDS church believes the U.S. Constitution is divinely inspired, there is a long history of armed, anti-government Mormon militias

Bundy supporters haven’t specifically mentioned Mormonism’s previous military entanglements, but the group’s history is still rife with examples of the faithful resisting rulers — specifically the United States government. This isn’t to say Mormons were ever apolitical: The religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, ran an unsuccessful campaign for president that ended abruptly when he was attacked and killed by a mob that disagreed with his political beliefs. Smith’s chief campaigner and successor, Brigham Young, ultimately lead most of the remaining Mormons to modern-day Utah, where he was appointed the first governor of what was then a U.S. territory.

It’s possible that higher-level authorities could get involved at some point, but that would be the exception instead of the rule.

But relations with the U.S. government and the religious settlers quickly deteriorated, resulting in the Utah War, sometimes called the “Mormon War.” Stretching from 1857–1858, the conflict began when the U.S. government sent an expedition of federal troops to the region, which the Mormon population — having endured oppression and violence before moving to Utah — saw as an attempt to annihilate their people. In response, the Mormons mustered an armed militia to harass the government soldiers, and while there were no formal battles, there were several skirmishes between the two forces. The conflict also set the stage for the infamous Mountain Meadows massacre, when Mormon-affiliated militiamen murdered 120 California-bound settlers over several days as they crossed through northern Utah.

Ultimately, though, the Bundy’s faith may just be the Mormon version of a mindset common throughout the American West — regardless of faith tradition.

“We can talk about the Bundys as Mormon, but their beliefs are very Western as well — it’s not a mistake that you see this happening in the West,” Bowman said. “There is a pervasive Libertarianism in the region.”

==

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-krakauer/fundamentalist-religious-ammon-bundy-militia-oregon_b_8931762.html

Ammon and Ryan Bundy, the brothers in command of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom — an armed group that has taken over a cluster of government buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in an empty swath of eastern Oregon desert — explain that they have occupied the facility to protest the “terrorism that the federal government is placing on the people.”

To understand the source of the Bundy’s self-righteous anger, it’s helpful to examine their religious views, which are rooted in a maverick strain of fundamentalism found throughout rural Oregon, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. I became intimately familiar with this worldview when I was conducting research for the book Under the Banner of Heaven.

My book tells the true story of two brothers, Dan and Ron Lafferty, who killed their sister-in-law and her infant daughter thirty-two years ago. Dan was sentenced to life in prison. Ron was sentenced to death. Dan claims they murdered this smart, compassionate woman and her baby because God commanded them to do so.

Below, are two excerpts from the book — five paragraphs from the Prologue, and Chapter Twelve in its entirety — which provide insight not only into the rationale given by the Lafferty brothers to justify these murders, but also into the rationale offered by the Bundy brothers for their own transgressive acts.

...The more he studied historical Mormon documents, the more certain Dan became that the LDS Church had blundered off course around 1890, when then-president and prophet Wilford Woodruff was coerced into doing away with the doctrine of plural marriage by the godless government in Washington, D.C. The modern LDS Church, Dan had become convinced, was an elaborate fraud.

Like fundamentalists in other faiths, he was intent on adhering unfailingly to God’s “true” commandments, as determined by a rigorously literal interpretation of his church’s earliest and most sacred texts. And he was no less intent on adhering to the “true” commandments of his country’s earliest and most sacred texts, as well. To Dan, such documents as the Book of Mormon, The Peace Maker, the United States Constitution, and The Declaration of Independence are all of a piece: They are holy scriptures that provide a direct link to the Almighty. The authority that flows from their divinely inspired sentences is absolute and immutable. And it is the duty of righteous men and women to conduct their lives according to a stringently literal reading of those sentences.

For people like Dan who view existence through the narrow lens of literalism, the language in certain select documents is assumed to possess extraordinary power. Such language is to be taken assiduously at face value, according to a single incontrovertible interpretation that makes no allowance for nuance, or ambiguity, or situational contingencies. As Vincent Crapanzano observes in his book, Serving the Word, Dan Lafferty’s brand of literalism encourages a closed, usually (though not necessarily) politically conservative view of the world: one with a stop-time notion of history and a we-and-they approach to people, in which we are possessed of truth, virtue, and goodness and they of falsehood, depravity, and evil. It looks askance at figurative language, which, so long as its symbols and metaphors are vital, can open -  promiscuously in the eyes of the strict literalist — the world and its imaginative possibilities.

For his part, Dan scoffs at this sort of pointy-headed exegesis. “I was just on a quest,” he insists. “A quest to find the truth.”

***

After seeking guidance through prayer, and receiving confirmation that he was acting in accordance with the Lord’s wishes, Dan sent his driver’s license back to the state of Utah, revoked his marriage license, and returned his Social Security card. He ignored posted speed limits, which he believed were illegal, and simply drove “wisely and carefully” instead. And he quit paying taxes of any kind  —  including the sales tax when he shopped in local stores, which provoked frequent confrontations with cashiers.

Energized by the self-evident righteousness of his crusade, in the summer of 1982 Dan declared himself a candidate for sheriff of Utah County and embarked on a lively political campaign, speaking at public forums, writing letters to the Provo newspaper, doing radio interviews, and riding in small-town parades. He promised, if elected, to enforce the laws according to a scrupulously literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. As he explained, “My motive in running was to restore the primacy of Common Law juries, and to restore the fundamentals of the Constitution.”

On October 4, 1982, Dan was driving home after meeting with another candidate for sheriff (the American Fork police chief, with whom Dan had hoped to engage in a public debate), when he was stopped on Interstate 15 by the Utah State Troopers for speeding and not having a vehicle inspection sticker. “I had already had some confrontations with the officer who pulled me over,” Dan allows. “He knew I would be driving home from this debate meeting, and he had set a trap for me. They wanted to get a felony against me so I couldn’t run for office, and they swarmed me on the freeway. I had just published an important article in the paper — a very important article — which had really unnerved a lot of people, about how the powers of government were being improperly used through improper warrants of arrest — how it was unconstitutional to stop a person on the freeway and arrest them.

“When the officer pulled me over, he told me he had read my article — ‘I’ve got it right here in my car,’ he said. So I told him, ‘Well, if you’ve read the article, you understand why you can’t arrest me right now. If you want to arrest me go get a warrant from a judge, bring it to my home, and I’ll conform to the proper procedures.’” Dan had by now locked the car doors and rolled up all the windows, leaving only a one-inch gap at the top of the diver’s window, which, he says, “I figured was narrow enough to keep a hand from reaching in and grabbing me, but would allow me to talk to the officer.”

The trooper wasn’t amused. He ordered Dan out of the car. “When I refused to get out,” says Dan, “the cop did something I hadn’t anticipated: He grabbed the top of the window with both hands and pulled hard, pulling the window out of its tracks, and then he tried to reach in and grab me. So I said, ‘Well, I gotta go now! See you later!’ and took off.”

“For people like Dan who view existence through the narrow lens of literalism, the language in certain select documents is assumed to possess extraordinary power.”

The State Troopers gave chase and apprehended Dan a short while later. He was charged with five crimes, including second-degree felony escape, third-degree felony assault by a prisoner, and evading an officer. Then he was thrown in the county jail. At his Justice Court trial, Dan served as his own attorney and attempted to mount a defense based on several arcane points of constitutional law. The judge repeatedly pointed out, however, that Justice Courts in Utah are not empowered to hear constitutional matters, which infuriated Dan. He was further angered when the judge overruled his objection to the makeup of the four-woman jury (Dan argued that he was entitled to have at least one male on the jury).

When Dan ignored the judge’s instructions and continued to argue his case on constitutional grounds, the exasperated judge declared him in contempt of court — at which point Dan’s brothers and several other supporters staged a riot in the courtroom, shouting that they were placing the judge, prosecutor, and court clerk under “citizen’s arrest.” In the middle of this melee, Dan stood up and loudly admonished the judge, “In the name of Christ, do justice or be struck down!”

*In the end, the theatrics didn’t do anything to help his case. Dan was sent to the state prison for a 45-day psychiatric evaluation, and then locked up in the county jail to serve a 30-day sentence.

His stay behind bars only hardened his resolve. As a matter of principle, he stopped paying the property taxes on his father’s home and business. His father’s property, Dan explains, was “owned free and clear. By paying property taxes, you are basically telling the government that they’re the ones who really own the property, because you give them the right to take it from you if you don’t pay your taxes. And I was willing to force a stand-off to determine who actually owned that property.”*

When that inevitable standoff occurred, Dan did not prevail. The Utah County assessor notified him that the county was taking possession of the Lafferty home for nonpayment of taxes, as well as seizing all of Watson Lafferty’s office equipment. At which point Dan politely informed the assessor’s office “that I intended to defend myself against any invasion of my constitutional God-given rights.”

Dan’s four younger brothers fully supported him in his ongoing battles with the state. But when Dan’s father — who was still out of the country on his LDS mission — learned that his home and business equipment were about to be auctioned off for non-payment of taxes, he was furious. Watson Sr. called Dan from abroad to express his profound displeasure, and to accuse Dan of “hypnotizing” his brothers; the Lafferty patriarch even suggested Dan was trying to hypnotize him and Claudine from afar, over the telephone line.

Watson managed to save his home from the auction block by cutting short his mission and rushing back to Provo with Claudine, but he remained furious at Dan. Although his father’s wrath saddened Dan, it did not dissuade him from his crusade.

During the last months of 1982 through early 1983, that crusade became more overtly religious, and Dan’s four younger brothers became increasingly infected with his fundamentalist zeal. The Lafferty boys started meeting on a more regular basis to discuss the merits of polygamy and other principles advocated in The Peace Maker. When three of Dan’s brothers attempted to impose these principles in their own homes, however, their wives refused, and began to complain to Dianna — the wife of Ron, the eldest Lafferty brother — about the disturbing changes in their husbands’ personalities.

***

NOTE: On January 4, 2016, in response to media inquiries, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued this statement, on www.mormonnewsroom.org, about the takeover of the federal facility in Oregon by the Bundy brothers, who are members of the LDS Church:

While the disagreement occurring in Oregon about the use of federal lands is not a Church matter, Church leaders strongly condemn the armed seizure of the facility and are deeply troubled by the reports that those who have seized the facility suggest that they are doing so based on scriptural principles. This armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis. We are privileged to live in a nation where conflicts with government or private groups can -  and should — be settled using peaceful means, according to the laws of the land.

:{*From the book: 

UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN by Jon Krakauer}:*

==

GOODMAN: Kierán Suckling, we are speaking to you in Portland, Oregon. In Yosemite right now, the national park, thousands of people are being evacuated because of terrible wildfires. I want to ask you about something else that happened in Oregon. Earlier this month, Donald Trump pardoned Dwight Hammond and his son Steven Hammond, two Oregon cattle ranchers who were convicted in 2012 of committing arson on federal lands. Prosecutors say the Hammonds set the fires to cover up their illegal deer poaching. Their conviction sparked armed right-wing militiamen, led by Ammon Bundy, to take over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, provoking a 41-day armed standoff in 2016. Can you comment on this and what message President Trump was sending with this, these pardons?

KIERÁN SUCKLING: This is very disturbing, because the Hammonds not only were arsonists who set fire to our public lands, threatening firefighters who were out there, but have a long history of threatening to kill federal officials. And when the Bundy militia group came up to support them when they were prosecuted, they came up there with the message of not just let’s help the Hammonds, but let’s give all of America’s public lands away to industry and state groups.

And so, when Trump is pardoning these people, he’s really signaling—sending a signal to this right-wing base to say, “Hey, anti-government extremism, threats of violence against those you don’t like, against the government, are acceptable.” They’re encouraged. And, in fact, earlier, when he pardoned Joe Arpaio, another very controversial action, well, it turns out Joe Arpaio, Sheriff Joe, was also a supporter of this Bundy group and this radical, violent agenda. And I think it goes along with Trump gearing up this violent undercurrent in America to support him and to drive fear into others.

==

frontline patriot

===

fed judge mistrial december

nd two of his sons after she found that prosecutors “willfully” failed to turn over evidence related to an armed standoff three years ago.

U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro pointed to several violations of the Brady rule — which requires prosecutors to disclose evidence that could be favorable to a defendant. She then called in jurors and dismissed the...

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-bundy-trial-20171220-story.html

==

https://www.opb.org/news/series/burns-oregon-standoff-bundy-militia-news-updates/nevada-mistrial/

again, members of the Bundy family have stymied federal prosecutors.

A U.S. District Court judge in Nevada declared a mistrial Wednesday in the case against rancher Cliven Bundy, his sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, and Ryan Payne for their role in an armed standoff against federal agents in 2014.

You might remember the Bundy brothers and Payne; they were the organizers of the takeover at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge two years ago.

Payne pleaded guilty to his role at the refuge. The Bundy brothers were acquitted in the Oregon case.

Now there are questions about how the federal government handled the Nevada case. Journalist Leah Sottile covered Malheur and is in Nevada this week covering the trial for the Washington Post and other outlets. She spoke to “All Things Considered” host John Notarianni on Wednesday about the mistrial. Hear the entire conversation by using the audio player at the top of this story. Meanwhile, here are the highlights:

Evidence Withheld

Judge Gloria Navarro declared the mistrial, in short, because there were six Brady Rule violations — cases where prosecutors withhold evidence that could be favorable to the defense.

Among other items, prosecutors failed to share evidence about the presence of a surveillance camera overlooking the Bundy family ranch, Bureau of Land Management snipers placed just outside the ranch and threat assessments done by federal officials that suggested the Bundys were not dangerous or capable of violence.

The Bundys and Ryan Payne all faced charges of conspiring to prevent federal officials from doing their jobs. In this case, that meant Bureau of Land Management officers who were trying to round up Bundy-owned cattle illegally grazing on public land.

A Mistrial Doesn’t Mean Not Guilty

Navarro was quick to point out that the mistrial had to do with Brady violations by the prosecution, not the defendants’ guilt or innocence. She essentially was ruling that the Bundys and Payne could not have a fair trial without full access to the evidence.

The defendants had sought an outright dismissal of the case. Lawyers for both sides have until Dec. 29 to file their arguments for why the case should or should not be retried.

Federal Government Struggles

The cases against Bundy family members in the Oregon and Nevada incidents are different, but there are some common themes.

In Oregon, prosecutors failed to convince a jury to convict despite the fact that much of the defense arguments had to do with their beliefs about the Constitution and public lands policy, rather than the specific laws they were charged with breaking.

A similar dynamic played out in Nevada before the mistrial.

===

https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-october-31-2016/

And, Arun Gupta, our news correspondent will join us in studio to discuss the Bundy Brothers’ acquittal, the Dakota Access protests, labor organizing, and more.

==

PORTLAND, Ore. — The armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge spanned 41 freezing cold days in January and February. The trial for the standoff’s leader, Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan and five others took six weeks. And the verdict came in just five days: all defendants were found not guilty of federal conspiracy charges.

It was the grand finale of a federal trial that played out like a three-ring circus. The trial often saw the ninth-floor courtroom packed with more than 100 people — jurors, attorneys, supporters, journalists — and another room four floors up packed with even more.

Just after 4 p.m. Thursday, Judge Anna Brown announced that all defendants were found not guilty of charges of conspiracy to impede federal officers and not guilty of possession of firearms in a federal facility. One of the occupiers, Kenneth Medenbach, was found not guilty of theft of a government-owned truck. The jury was hung on the charge of theft of government cameras against Ryan Bundy.

...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/27/jury-acquits-leaders-of-armed-takeover-of-the-oregon-wildlife-refuge-of-federal-conspiracy-charges/?utm_term=.be796e0651a5

Post Nation

Jury acquits Ammon Bundy, six others for standoff at Oregon wildlife refuge

 Leah Sottile October 27, 2016

==

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/frightening-implications-acquittals-oregon-standoff

On Thursday, seven anti-government protesters who took over a federally owned wildlife sanctuary in Oregon last winter were acquitted of all charges. Led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy, sons of rancher Cliven Bundy, who is being tried for another illegal standoff with the federal government, the group's lawyers were somehow able to persuade a jury in federal court that this was a case of government over-reach, not domestic terrorism. The acquittals on all federal conspiracy and weapons charges shocked many.

“I had been telling my client you can count on being convicted,” Matthew Schindler, a lawyer for one of the men on trial for the armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, told the Wasington Post. “You don’t walk into a federal court and win a case like this. It just doesn’t happen.”

The Wild West-like armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Preserve in southeastern Oregon started as a protest against the arrests of two men who illegally started fires at the preserve, and was rooted in the rabid anti-government belief that the federal government has no right to control the lands that fall under its jurisdiction. Eleven people had already pleaded guilty in the standoff. One, who said he'd rather die than be arrested, got his wish: LaVoy Finicum was killed by authorities at the end of the standoff.

Although the takeover was clearly planned, ringleader Ammon Bundy argued it was a spontaneous action rooted in his religious beliefs. These beliefs apparently inspired him to put out the call to like-minded people nationwide to join his band of outlaws with their guns. One wonders if his beliefs and followers had been Muslim how that argument would have gone over.

The verdict is seen to have potentially frightening implications. John Horning, executive director of WildEarth Guardians, worried it would embolden others and endanger employees of public land-management agencies. “It is entirely possible there will be threats or intimidations from militants that believe such actions are justified by this verdict.”

It could also embolden other far-right groups calling themselves "patriots," such as the Oath Keepers, who see far-ranging conspiracies like election rigging and a plot to deprive them of their Second Amendment rights. The group, which is made up of former military and law enforcement officers, and others like it, are calling for members to "take action on election day." Oath Keepers "has urged its members to 'blend in' with voters and do 'incognito intelligence gathering and crime spotting' at polling places across the country on Nov. 8," the Post reported this week.

The Bundy brothers remain in custody, still facing charges along with their father for the standoff at Bundy ranch.

*===

http://www.alternet.org/belief/what-link-between-oregon-militiamen-and-mormonism

On the afternoon of Tuesday the 26th of January, LaVoy Fincum, a rancher from Mohave County, Arizona, was shot and killed by law enforcement officers. It happened on Highway 395 in Oregon after he and other members of an armed right-wing group were subject to a police stop. They were on their way to try to spread their mission of resistance to the U.S. government to neighbouring counties.*

On thevideo released late on Thursday by the FBI, we can see the action as captured by a drone overhead. In the final moments of his life, Finicum attempts to avoid police by driving a car  — containing three other members of the group they called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom —  into a roadside snow drift.

He emerges from the suddenly stationary vehicle with his hands outstretched, and appears to talk to the two state police officers trying to apprehend him with their guns drawn. Then he reaches for his pocket, where he has a loaded pistol, according to law enforcement. He is immediately shot by one of the officers, and falls to the ground. 

We see a 55-year-old family man, who has had ample time to think, make a conscious choice to throw his life away. 

In many ways, Finicum was the philosopher of the group. He acted as a spokesman, and pushed their stark constitutional originalism in media appearances and press conferences.

The conspiracy theorists in the broader patriot movement are already working on the ambiguities that the footage - any footage - makes available to the paranoid. But Finicum’s choice to die is in keeping with what he repeatedly told me and other journalists during the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Time and again, he said that liberty was more important than life. That despite missing his ranch and his family, he would rather die than go to prison.

What is capable of turning a grievance over grazing rights into a matter of life and death? When do political beliefs become something one is prepared to both kill and die for?

The first clue is in what Finicum shared with the Bundys at the Refuge, and with their father Cliven at home in Nevada. They were all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and all from a corner of the country with a habit of departing from the respectable path the church’s hierarchy has been charting for more than a century.

The second are the pocket Constitutions the group ostentatiously carried around from the first morning of their stay. One the surface those were simply underscoring the occupiers’ claims that in their alleged persecution of Dwight and Steven Hammond - local ranchers sent back to prison for arson on federal property - and their general management of public land, the federal government was acting unconstitutionally.

Courtney Campbell, a professor of religion at Oregon State University, says that in part, “Why these protestors are carrying around the constitution is that they do feel their constitutional rights to freedom of religion and association, to due process and the law have been violated by the government.”

But these are not any old constitutions. They are editions published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, founded by W. Cleon Skousen, who like the Bundy family and Finicum, was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. If you order in bulk, you can get them for as little 35 cents apiece.

Skousen’s editions pair the text of the constitution - which many Mormons believe to be divinely inspired - with highly selective quotes from the founding fathers, with the intention of persuadine readers that the republic was a Christian enterprise from the outset, and was part of a divine promise. 

Skousen - who died in 2006 at the age of 92 - was a popular, prolific writer who had stints in the FBI and as Salt Lake City police chief. He was also one of the most prominent and influential ultraconservative political activists  in mid-century America, inspiring the John Birch Society’s febrile brand of anticommunist conspiracy thinking.

He insisted - at the height of the Cold War - that various government agencies were riddled with Communist infiltrators, and that this put America in existential danger. In books like The Naked Communist, first published in 1958, Skousen gave a lurid picture of the degree to which communists were embedded in public life, their tactics and what he saw as the godless nihilism of their world view. More conciliatory foreign policy, divorce law reform and campaigns against school prayer were just some of his examples of communists working toward the subversion of American life.

But Skousen was also a deeply involved Latter-Day Saint, serving for a time as a professor at Brigham Young University. Seth Payne, a former Mormon who began researching LDS conspiracy beliefs at Harvard Divinity School, explains that “when Skousen would talk to LDS audiences about these subjects he would bring in the religious element. He would describe these conspiracies as ‘secret combinations’. Secret combinations are not just criminal gangs or people looking for power. At the root of secret combinations is a Satanic influence.” 

He was able to find support for these claims in the LDS church’s central text, the Book of Mormon.

When LDS founder and prophet Joseph Smith was assembling his prophetic book in the late 1820s - supposedly as a translation of golden plates left for the purpose by the angel Moroni - he incorporated elements of all the popular enthusiasms swirling around in upstate New York, where he was then living. His testament purported to tell the story of ancient inhabitants of the Americas who were descendents of the tribes of Israel, and who were visited by the risen Christ. But in a sense it was very much a book of its time.

It reflects Protestant revivalism, Israelism (the idea, popular in the 19th century that certain peoples, or groups were descended from the lost tribes of Israel), occultism and folk religion, and then-current anti-Masonic ideas. 

Payne explains that while Smith did not specifically call out Masons, he used “secret combinations” as a familiar euphemism for Masonic activity. In the Book, “secret combinations” of satanic conspirators brought about the end of the Jeredites and the Nephites, two of the civilizations the book describes.

These were working in the interests of “Satan’s plan.” In Mormon theology, the conflict between this and God’s plan goes back to the beginning of time. While Lucifer wanted humans to be compelled to be obedient to God so they would be guaranteed a return to heaven, God wanted humans to be able to freely choose, so they would benefit from their time on earth.

In this way, Payne says, the Book of Mormon melds “classical Liberal thought with religious thought - the Protestant ethic and Protestant theology of the early 19th century - so tightly so that there really is no separation.” Liberal individual autonomy is a gift from God, and compelled behavior - even if it results in good deeds - is worthless for salvation, and even an artefact of the devil’s continuing effort to erode the power of human will.

Anti-Masonic enthusiasms are long-forgotten, but the idea of secret combinations carrying out Satan’s plan is very much alive. In a paper, Payne explains that “modern LDS conservatives tend to view any government action which compels behavior — even if that behavior is moral and productive — as being a version of Satan’s original plan to force God’s children to do good.”

That’s why many conservative Mormons, even those who would stop short at actions like those that the Bundys have taken, are bitterly opposed to welfare and other government programs that have a benevolent purpose.

In Skousen’s thought, this all mapped neatly onto his anticommunist zeal. He was faced, he thought, with “secret combinations” of communist infiltrators, and socialist schemes were not just politically disagreeable, but setbacks in “a cosmic battle going on where Satan is trying to infringe on individual liberty or state sovereignty.”

Except among conservative Mormons, Skousen’s influence faded long before the end of the cold war. Then Glenn Beck—another conspiratorially inclined, conservative Mormon—reintroduced it to a broader audience late last decade, managing to lift books like The 5000 Year Leap back onto the bestseller lists. Beck managed to recast Skousen’s thought to cast suspicion on the ambitions of President Obama, in particular, his plans to deliver universal health care. 

Payne says, “Glenn Beck reintroduced Skousen’s ideas—his anticommunism and fears about sovereignty —to a broader community. That resonates with people who think that the president is a communist.”

Meanwhile, other Mormon conspiracists like Joel Skousen, nephew of Cleon, continue all the while to push the idea of secret combinations in the service of Satan’s plan, which was now identified less with communism than the institution of a single world government under the control of “globalists." In one sense, this bears similarities to the conspiracy ideas of essentially secular figures like Alex Jones. There's enough common ground for Joel Skousen—also an icon of the prepper movement—to have appeared several times on Jones’ radio program.

But the distinctive spiritual dimension of LDS-derived conspiracism raises the stakes for a segment of ulturaconservative Mormons. For some, like the Bundy group, such ideas are a stimulus to radical action.

Disaffection with federal government agencies is widespread throughout the western interior. Whether it is the festering issue of grazing rights, and perceptions that the BLM is antagonistic toward ranchers, or the feeling that conservation of native species like wolves or the spotted owl is taking precedence over ranchers’ interests, the emerging “sagebrush rebellion” takes in a lot of actors and sympathizers who are not Mormons. 

But like the vast majority of conservative Mormons, very few ranchers have shown themselves willing to carry out armed occupations of federal buildings.

The resurgent militia and :{sovereign citizen :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:movements have beliefs that overlap with the more religiously inclined conspiracists, They also fear world government and federal government tyranny, espouse an eccentric form of constitutional originalism, try to reassert local and state jurisdiction over federal land, and are prepared to use tactics of harrassment and intimidation, as they’ve shown in Harney County.

But even those who had been cooperating with the Bundys in organizing locals in opposition to the reimprisonment of Steven and Dwight Hammond were appalled in the early days of the occupation that the Bundy group had departed from a longer plan and involved the federal government. And in this circumstance, none have shown that they are willing to die.

In explaining Finicum’s actions, we need to take into account his particular form of radically ultraconservative Mormon belief. As Payne says, “for a believing Latter-Day Saint who takes these things seriously, they aren’t just looking at some political machinations for money and power, they’re looking at an eternal cosmic struggle that’s been going on since the beginning of time.”

The Bundys—and Finicum—see themselves as “soldiers in this resistance against not just political tyranny but also Satanic tyranny.”

This belief may be reflected even in the names they have been given and chosen. Ammon Bundy’s first name comes from an important personage in the book of Mormon—a warrior who spreads God’s word to unbelievers.The scriptural Ammon, Campbell says, “provides a model for the sort of person who stands up to oppression and unjust governments, resists and prevails.”

Campbell also points out that Finicum made veiled references to “the Title of Liberty,” a story from the Book of Mormon in which Captain Moroni of the Nephites “in the face of of a government that’s become tyrannical, individuals and their communities need to stand up for their liberty, their religion, and their land.” Another of the occupiers, Dylan Anderson, used Captain Moroni as his alias when talking to reporters.

Other references to Mormon lore came before the occupation, such as in a video where Bundy said that the constitution was “hanging by a thread," an allusion to the so-called White Horse Prophecy, in which Joseph Smith reportedly predicted that a time would come when Mormons would have to restore constitutional government.

Payne points out that there are serious dounts as to whether Joseph Smith ever said such a thing, and that it comes from secondhand accounts of his remarks by followers. The LDS church itself felt bound to say that the prophecy “has not been substantiated by historical research” after Mormon politicians like Orrin Hatch and Rex Rammel referred to it in the early years of the Obama administration. “It’s an urban legend, a folk myth.” Nevertheless, over the years “it has taken hold in the LDS community; even in mainstream LDS you’ll hear that phrase used.”

People like the Bundys and Finicum, “take that phrase and see themselves as elders of Israel who are going to save the Constitution.”

What is one man’s life in the face of such a cause, and such a danger?

The LDS church was quick to disown the occupation and the Bundys' actions. In 2012, sensing a growing wave of Skousenite Mormon activity, LDS Church Elder Apostle Dallin Oakswarned against “the influence of right-wing groups who mistakenly apply prophecies about the last days to promote efforts to form paramilitary or other organizations… The leaders of the church have always taught that we should observe the law and we should not try to substitute our own organizations for the political and military authorities put in place by constitutional government and processes. We counsel against joining or supporting paramilitary organizations.”

No doubt this reflects the sincere disapproval of the vast majority of Mormons, even conservatives. And the Bundys represent a significant departure from the teachings of the church, according to Campbell. “They really emphasize that there needs to be obedience to the laws of the land. Even if there’s some kind of injustice that’s occurred, you don’t take over property, you don’t take over land.”

Actions like these also imperil the respectability Mormons have worked so hard to maintain from the beginning of the 20th century. In the 19th century, they came into open conflict with the federal government. First, in the 1850s, over their own territorial ambitions and a perception that the Utah Territory under Prophet Brigham Young was in insurrection. And later, in the 1890s, as they were forced to give up the practice of polygamy.

Payne explains that rebellions such as the Malheur occupation are embarrassing to the church hierarchy and many ordinary Mormons, since they “harken back to a period that most Mormons are embarrassed about from time to time—those days of conflict with the federal government and the American society as a whole.”

The Utah/Arizona/Nevada tri-state area, where the Bundys and Finicum are from, has been a reliable source of such embarrassments. Northern Arizona was the long-time locale for the polygamist holdouts of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints under Warren Jeffs. Not far away in Nevada, the Bundy ranch standoff provided the immediate precursor for the occupation just ended.

People in such areas of the American West are culturally isolated, even from the moderating influences of contemporary Mormon practice.

“It’s certainly peculiar to areas in the western United States that are difficult to get to because they’re mountainous or arid,” Campbell says of these fundamentalist currents. “They’ve been historically bypassed by other people as they migrated to western Oregon or California. As a result there has been a tradition of anti-government anti-authoritarianism, where a person is accountable to God and not to civil authority.”

LaVoy Finicum clearly had a lot to lose: his ranch, his family, his life. But by melding his political beliefs with cosmic struggle, by embracing a tendentious reading of scripture and prophecy, by viewing those he disagreed with not just as political adversaries but as agents of the devil, Finicum turned a cause into a death wish. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/authorities-plan-cut-power-militia-occupied-oregon-refuge authorities Plan to Cut off Power to Militia at Occupied Oregon Refuge

January 5, 2016, 7:01am -0 comments

January 3, 2016, 6:02pm -0 comments

January 22, 2016,

With the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge almost three weeks old and tempers fraying at a community meeting in the nearby town of Burns, Oregon, one voice has been absent from the drama: the Fish and Wildlife Service employees whose work has been disrupted and offices turned into an armed camp by anti-government militants.

In a Raw Story exclusive, former and current employees of the Malheur Refuge have provided new revelations on the conflict between Dwight and Steve Hammond, two local ranchers who have clashed with federal government agencies for decades. The employees claim the Hammonds illegal grazing was damaging the refuge that’s home to 320 bird and 58 mammal species. They allege the Hammonds lawbreaking ranged from aerial hunting of animals in the refuge to death threats against employees and their families to cattle grazing that was altering the entire species composition of critical ecosystems.

The Fish and Wildlife Service did not return a request for comment. Sources say there is a gag order on employees now that the FBI is in charge of monitoring the occupation by Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, and his supporters.

The beef the Hammonds currently have with the feds is over access to land under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. More than 20 years ago the Hammonds also had a permit for grazing on the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. That was canceled in the mid-90s because of what officials say was the Hammonds’ constant violation of the permit’s terms. Today, the FWS is still caught in the middle because the Hammonds need to cross the 187,700 acres of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge to access the BLM land on which their cattle are allowed to graze.

Marvin Plenert, 80, who served as Northwest regional director for the Fish and Wildlife Service from 1986 to 1994,says the agency tried to accommodate the Hammonds. “We gave them a day to cross through the refuge and they took two or three weeks to do it. They were in your face about everything. They kept pushing the envelope, cut fences, cattle wound up in the refuge illegally.”

Plenert’s tenure overlapped with that of Forrest Cameron, 67, who served as the Fish and Wildlife Service manager of the Malheur Refuge from 1989 to 1999. Cameron, who now lives in Portland and is retired like Plenert, had numerous run-ins with the Hammonds.

In his first in-depth interview since the occupation began, Cameron says the conflict between the Hammonds and the Fish and Wildlife Service goes back to the 1980s when they leveled death threats against the previous refuge manager. Cameron says during his time “one way or another the Hammonds were violating their permit” for grazing cattle on refuge lands. He says it was an ongoing issue and, “They’ve done so many illegal activities that never got to a courtroom.”

“Some violations were not significant,” says Cameron, “and we figured we could correct it by talking to them.”

Once, however, a biologist employed at the refuge reported, “The Hammonds were aerial gunning coyotes on the Malheur Refuge, which is illegal.” Cameron claims the Hammonds had an airplane at the time. “They were flying to shoot coyotes on their (own) land, and we didn’t have a problem with that.” The biologist allegedly witnessed the Hammonds’ plane “flying low, turning tight corners, and shooting, and it was over refuge property.” The issue was raised with the Hammonds “and they claimed they were not over the refuge.” Cameron says, “There were so many other contentious things going on that was one incident we didn’t push.”

In the 1990s the conflict with the Hammonds stemmed from the Fish and Wildlife view that their cattle were damaging the Malheur refuge. It was the following decade that the Hammonds illegally torched BLM lands, landing them in the clink for five years each and sparking the takeover.

It’s now well-known that Malheur, an oasis in the arid Great Basin that spans six states, is called “one of the crown jewels of the National Wildlife Refuge System.” It’s a “crucial stop along the Pacific Flyway and offers resting, breeding and nesting habitat for hundreds of migratory birds and other wildlife.” But the little-known story is how years of uncontrolled grazing by Hammonds and other ranchers were sending shockwaves through the refuge.

Cameron says when he arrived at Malheur in 1989, relations were “fairly good” with local ranchers, and about 30 of them had permits for grazing and haying on refuge land. Prior to his arrival changes had been made to match grazing policies with enforcement. He says National Wildlife Refuges allow public recreation in any way feasible. “That can be hunting, fishing, birdwatching, hiking — as long as it’s compatible with the wildlife on the refuge.” Cattle had been grazing year-round on Malheur, but the policy has a higher threshold for economic uses like grazing. “It has to be beneficial to wildlife or otherwise we don’t allow it.”

Implementing the prescribed grazing practices led the Hammonds and Fish and Wildlife Service to butt heads in the early 1990s over the Bridge and Mud creeks and a watering hole for birds. Cameron says Hammonds’ cattle would get into Bridge Creek, a deep canyon, “until someone drove them out.” The cattle would devour woody plant species crucial to the ecosystem....

  1. ### From Tampons to French Vanilla Creamer: Armed Oregon Militants Update Their Occupation Wish List

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  1. ### Oregon Militia's Behavior Increasingly Brazen as Public Property Destroyed

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  1. ### Republican Presidential Candidates Silent on Armed Militia Takeover of Federal Building in Oregon

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  1. ### Warning from the Birding Community to the Terrorists in Oregon: We're Watching You

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  1. ### Oregon Militia Makes Plea for Snacks, PETA Responds With Yummy Vegan Jerky

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  1. ### Oregon Armed Occupiers Include Prominent Anti-Islam Activist

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  1. ### If the Oregon Militiamen Were Muslim or Black, They'd Probably Be Dead By Now

January 17, 2016, 9:19pm -0 comments

==

cbd

An armed militia has taken over a federal building in southeastern Oregon as part of a long-running campaign of violence, intimidation and right-wing paranoia that has festered for decades in the West, most recently with the standoff with Cliven Bundy in Nevada in 2014. Among the demands at the latest standoff is to shut down Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which provides crucial protections for wildlife, especially birds that migrate through the area.

Ammon Bundy is the leader of the occupation that took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge building. Photo credit: Amanda Peacher / OPB

“This is the latest in a long string of armed, right-wing thugs attempting to seize America’s public lands and enact their paranoid, anti-government dream bought by guns and intimidation,” Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “We’ve seen it with pipe bombs planted on wilderness trails and sent to the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. We saw in 2014 with Cliven Bundy and his racist and violent rhetoric in Nevada and now we’re seeing it with his sons in Oregon.”

Cliven Bundy stopped paying the federal government for the privilege of grazing his cows on public lands in Nevada and owes about $1 million to taxpayers. Bundy, who was quoted in an interview with The New York Times wondering whether black people were better off as slaves, was the center of an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in April 2014 that ended with the bureau backing away and Bundy’s continued trespass on federal land. Among the anti-federal government militia who were defending Bundy at his ranch was Jared Miller who just three months after the standoff at the ranch went on a shooting spree with his wife that included the ambush-murder of two Las Vegas police officers as they ate at a restaurant. They draped the officers with a Gadsden flag—a symbol of liberty used by both theantigovernment “Patriot” movement and members of the Tea Party movement.

The latest standoff near Burns, Oregon, followed a judge’s call for additional prison time for a father and son—73-year-old Dwight Hammond and 46-year-old Steven Hammond—who prosecutors say lit a fire on federal land in 2001 to cover up the illegal slaughter of a deer herd. Both were convicted of arson and are scheduled to report to federal prison on Monday.

The wildlife refuge’s headquarters was seized by Bundy’s sons, including leader of the occupation Ammon Bundy, and others on Saturday. The men are armed and say they are willing to occupy the building for years if needed. According to the Oregonian, Ryan Bundy said that they’re willing to kill and be killed if necessary. Also among the armed occupiers of the wildlife refuge building is Jon Ritzheimer, an infamous anti-Muslim activist who has repeatedly threatened violence.

“Despite their flags and patriotic overtures, don’t mistake this standoff for anything than what it is: An attempt to use guns to seize control over what taxpayers own and bully the government into acquiescing to their demands,” Suckling said. “But there’s a larger context here. What’s happening in Oregon is a logical outgrowth of right-wing rhetoric that demonizes even the concept of federal land—places like national parks and forests—and villainizes those who believe that publicly owned land should be more than just a source of profit for ranchers and corporations.”

There’s been a growing movement among politicians in the West to seize control of federal lands and hand them over to state and local government, where they’re more likely to be logged, mined and drilled for profit.

“These are special places that deserve protection for values that we all hold dear: clean air, water and refuge for wildlife,” Suckling said. “Americans, collectively, have decided that these public lands need and deserve protection. That shouldn’t be undone at the behest of men with guns and a dangerous view of how a government should be run.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/05/bundy-militia-public-lands/

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no links

BURNS, Ore. -- An Oregon ranching duo convicted of arson charges clashed with the Bureau of Land Management for more than a decade before sparking the movement that ended with dozens of anti-government demonstrators seizing a wildlife refuge in rural Harney County, according to court documents.

Dwight Hammond Jr., 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, turned themselves in at a California federal prison facility Monday, months after a ninth circuit court judge ruled sentences previously handed down by a lower court were illegal.

The appeals court decision spurred backlash in eastern Oregon from those who believed the Hammonds were being unfairly treated. The reaction reached a peak when a faction of supporters broke off from a larger protest in Burns, Ore. and headed to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge about 30 miles southeast of town.

The group's demands range from the Hammonds' release from prison to the government relinquishing control and abolishing regulations on public lands.

More: What we know about the armed seizure in Oregon

According to an indictment filed June 17, 2010, the BLM issued the Hammonds a rangeland grazing permit in 2004, which allowed the ranch's cattle to graze on public land in addition to the private land owned by Hammond Ranches.

Prosecutors alleged in the indictment the Hammond family set fire to the rangeland after complaining the BLM was taking too long to complete required environmental studies before conducting controlled burn operations.

“The evidence at trial convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the Hammonds were guilty of the federal crime of arson.”

Acting U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams

"The Hammonds also have ignited uncontrolled fires under cover of naturally occuring dry lightning storms which occur on the western slopes of the Steens Mountain in late summers," then-United States Attorney Dwight C. Holton wrote in the indictment. "For more than twenty years, Hammond family members have been responsible for multiple fires in the Steens Mountain area."

A jury convicted the pair of starting the 2001 Hardie-Hammond Fire that burned 139 acres of BLM land. Steven Hammond was also convicted of intentionally starting the 2006 Lower Bridge Creek Fire. Despite the five-year mandatory minimum for a federal arson conviction, Judge Michael Hogan sentenced the elder Hammond to three months behind bars and his son to a year and a day.

But after prosecutors appealed the decision, both men were resentenced in October to the five-year mandatory minimum. They were allowed to self-surrender after the holidays.

Previous: Militia members speak out about occupation of wildlife refuge

Acting United States Attorney Billy J. Williams wrote in a Dec. 7 op-ed in the Burns Times Herald that the Hammonds' backers did not have the whole story.

"I understand that there are some individuals and organizations who object to the Hammonds returning to prison to serve the remainder of their sentences mandated by statute," he wrote. "I respect their right to peacefully disagree with the prison terms imposed. However, any criminal behavior contemplated by those who may object to the court's mandate that harms someone will not be tolerated and will result in serious consequences."

KTVB

ICA: Protesters don't represent ranching community

Supporters of the two men maintain the Hammonds started fires to destroy invasive species and protect their property by removing wildfire fuels, and that flames spread to public lands inadvertently.

But witnesses in the trial told a different story. The jury heard from three witnesses who were hunting in 2001 when they saw the Hammonds shoot over their heads to illegally slaughter a herd of deer, according to court documents. A short time later, the hunters testified, they had to abandon their camp because of a fire burning in the area.

A teenage relative of the Hammonds also testified during the trial that Steven Hammond gave him a box of matches and told him to drop lit matches on the ground to "light up the whole county on fire," Williams wrote.

Williams says photographs and testimony from the hunting guide proved the fires were set hours before Steven Hammond called the BLM to report he was about to conduct a burn of invasive species in the area.

Related: Sheriff to armed protesters: 'Go home to your families'

The U.S. Attorney dismissed arguments that the Hammonds were accused of terrorism.

"The evidence at trial convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the Hammonds were guilty of the federal crime of arson; that is, maliciously damaging United States property by fire," he wrote. "The jury was neither asked if the Hammonds were terrorists, nor were defendants ever charged with or accused of terrorism. Suggesting otherwise is simply flat-out wrong."

The second arson in 2006 came as firefighting crews were battling lightning-started wildfires on BLM land. A burn ban and red flag warning was in effect in the area at the time.

"Despite the burn ban, and knowing that firefighters were in the area, Steven Hammond set fires at night without notifying anyone," Williams wrote. "He did so to save his winter feed. After seeing the fires, the firefighters moved to a safer location."

When confronted by a firefighter the following day, Hammond admitted to starting the fire, Williams wrote.

“We have evidence of eyewitnesses that saw... two agents from the Bureau of Land Management that actually lit the fire with a drip torch...”

Ammon Bundy, Citizens for Constitutional Freedom

Williams argues the Hammonds' sentences follow the law and are not excessive, considering the danger in which the Hammonds' actions placed the hunters and the firefighters. He also suggested that much of the outcry after the resentencing came from those who have not bothered to follow the case.

"Much has been said and written by persons who were not in the Pendleton courtroom during the trial or in Eugene during the sentencing hearings," he wrote. "Much of it is inaccurate."

But Ammon Bundy, the leader of the militia group that has seized the wildlife refuge, said Wednesday that he had uncovered new evidence he believes will exonerate the father and son.

"We have evidence of eyewitnesses that saw the Bureau of Land Management - an agent, two agents from the Bureau of Land Management - that actually lit the fire with a drip torch on the south and the north side of the Hammonds' Steen Mountain property," he said.

More: Oregan Indian tribe calls for end to standoff

Bundy said the Hammonds started a back burn after the fire closed in on their winter range.

"This is something that as far as we're aware of has never been acknowledged or reviewed in the court," he said. "We feel that it is strong enough evidence that, going through the proper measures, we will be able to get the Hammonds released."

If the group is successful in getting the ranchers exonerated, Bundy said, he believes the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will have been worth it.

The occupiers have previously said the Hammond family was targeted as part of a plot by federal agencies to steal their ranch.

"Those agencies has desired for many years to acquire their ranch, and the Hammond family have refused to sell it because they want to pass on the ranching heritage to their children and to their grandchildren," Bundy said in a Monday news conference. "Because of that refusal to sell their ranch, those agencies began an attack on this family."

He described the Hammonds' legal case as a tipping point in the fight against government overreach.

"There comes a time when people are ignored to the point they're frustrated, they don't know what else to do - they see an injustice but all level of government are ignoring it," Bundy said. "And the prudent methods are basically not allowed to the people. That is when the people have a right to take a hard stand, and that is what we did."

http://www.ktvb.com/

grassfire crossed boundary

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-militia-threatens-showdown-us-agents-oregon-wildlife-refuge

http://www.alternet.org/media/cnn-analyst-white-militiamen-arent-threat-black-protesters-because-theyre-not-looting-anything

CNN law enforcement analyst Art Roderick said over the weekend that armed protesters who took over a federal building in Oregon were not being treated harshly like Black Lives Matter protesters and Muslims would be because they were “not looting anything.”

On Saturday, an armed group of militiamen and members of Cliven Bundy’s family seized the Malheur Wildlife Refuge headquarters to protest sentences against two ranchers who were convicted of setting wildfires.

==

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/tea-partying-anti-obamacare-ex-sheriff-now-begging-help-pay-medical-bills

the courageous 'Tea Party' leader and former County Sheriff who hid behind the women on the 'front lines of freedom' at the Bundy Ranch last year, is now asking the public to pay for much needed health care for both himself and his wife. Via TPM...

Former Arizona county sheriff Richard Mack, a fierce opponent of Obamacare and a leader in the "constitutional sheriff" movement, is struggling to pay his medical bills after he and his wife each faced serious illnesses. The former sheriff and his wife do not have health insurance and started a GoFundMe campaign to solicit donations from family and friends to cover the costs of their medical care....

Mack, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, suffered a heart attack in January and is in recovery. His wife fell ill late last year. Mack is on the board of Oath Keepers, a right-wing fringe group made up of police and military veterans, and is known for supporting Cliven Bundy in his standoff against the federal government. He is also an ardent opponent of Obamacare.

==

==

http://www.bridgeproject.com/who-else-supports-cliven-bundys-cause-the-koch-backed-americans-for-prosperity/

flamed out in racist q about whether blacks were better off as slaves (but note that the underlying claims are standard: welfare queen plus abortion; interesting to note prison (some synch left-right on expense of prison)

afp bails/scrubs: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/koch-brothers-cliven-bundy_n_5213481.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

parody of battle for Blair Mtn

bails gop http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/cliven-bundy-republican_n_5398474.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/02/1296373/-Bundy-Thugs-Poured-Lighter-Fluid-Around-Media-Trucks-Issued-Bomb-Threats

When a bunch of American-hating thugs decided to help Cliven Bundy violently violate a Federal Court order they engaged in terrorist threats and terrorist activities against: BLM, Nevada Metro Police, Federal employees, National Park Rangers, Nevada State Police,  News crews and Hotel clerks.

Within the past few days, local 8 News NOW received Police Reports and other information that show Bundy's Anti-American, Anti-Government thugs:

SHERIFF LOMARDO: "We were outgunned, outmanned and there would not have been a good result from it."

As is the case with many terrorist organizations who hold people hostage at gun point, terrorist leader Cliven Bundy issued "demands" to the United States government in exchange for releasing law enforcement from gun point and threats.  

Cliven Bundy gave the US Government one hour to meet his demands and if the Government did not meet his demands his thugs would continue to terrorize law enforcement, federal employees, News crews and hotel staff.

In the video above, Bundy underscores that he is a lying, psychotic, thieving sociopath. Using a sickening, demented, terrorist method, Bundy intimidated Sheriff Lomardo into standing on stage with Bundy as Bundy gave his demands:

BUNDY: ...disarm the Park service -- and all Federal Parks the US Government claims they have jurisdiction over. Take your county bulldozers and tear down the entrance places -- the -- where they ticket us and where they - ah - entrance and make us citizens pay their fees. You get the county equipment down there and tear those things down this morning. You disarm those Park service people.  You take a pick-up [truck] and I want those arms. [Facing the crowd of thugs] WE want those arms picked up don't we?Call Riley Disposal and go up here ta this compound [pointing at Bundy's compound] and we want all of those arms put in that compound taday! We want those arms delivered right here under these flags in one hour! And media -- are you here media? I want you to go to everyplace that they gotta central park service - ah - station and you watch those county machines tear down those -- those place taday in the next hour. And you [media] report back to these people -- we the people in one hour. If it's not -- if there's not done then we'll decide what we're gonna do from that -- this point on.

(emphasis in bold by me)

==

This is not snark.  The events in this diary actually are happening and did happen.

The Oath Keepers took to their website and accused Bundy's top Security crew, Booda Bear, Ryan Paine & Jerry 'somebody' of being FBI infiltrators.  This happened roughly 24 hours after Bundy's top security crew, Booda Bear & his two underlings, Ryan & Jerry, kicked the Oath Keepers off the ranch and accused them of: "stealing' being "deserters," "traitors," committing "treason of the highest order" and learning that Ryan Paine said, on video, that the Oath Keepers were "[lucky [they're] not getting shot in the back' for deserting the Bundy battlefield](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/29/1295445/-Bundy-Ranch-Oath-Keepers-Lucky-They-Didn-t-Get-Shot-In-The-Back-For-Deserting-Bundy-Battlefield)."

A typical FBI psy-op would plant “leaders” in every militia they could infiltrate. What those sorts of FBI agents or surrogates do is always “handled”. Some of the purported “leaders” of the militia at the ranch are doing exactly what any agent provocateur would do after having infiltrated the militia and claimed a role in leadership. Did you notice the massive ego about who is going to command who? Did you notice the drama in the tendency to speak of Oath Keepers as if we were a militia, which we are not. These militia “leaders” would judge us by battlefield standards even though there has not been a “battlefield” since April 12, 2014? They would shoot us for desertion? Really? That is amazing, and is the kind of bumbling consciousness which a conditioned and programmed special warfare officer or a federal agent would offer if he had to think on his feet of a sudden.

~ Oath Keeper website April 29, 2014

LMFAO ... "programmed special warfare officer or a federal agent would offer" ... the Oath Keepers are going to scare the crap out of those already paranoid militia at welfare-king Bundy's ranch.

Oath Keepers continued to plant their 'FBI infiltrators' seed and wrote:

I’ll confide something with you. Let us not be deceived about the real strength and power of the true American militia. Let us examine any militia which opposes the historic role of the Constitutional militia of the several States. Yesterday I had a longish phone conversation with Mike Vanderboegh, who was wanting to think-tank some stuff with me for concurrence in what we might do next to combat the idiocy being circulated presently. All you III%ers [3%ers -- dumb name they use collectively] listen-up. As Mike and I were talking about the situation I said something to which he replied, “Well, how do we know that they are the militia of the people?” I pondered that and thanked him for bringing it up

... We were suggesting that the FBI (and other related groups) firmly believes in creating its own opposition for purposes of controlling it from atop and within. The model is searchable online as “COINTELPRO”.  The fedgov infiltrates all social and cultural segments of America’s population. It is best to presume that the militias across America are all infiltrated. If you want to see the leadership of the co-opted militias currently at the Bundy ranch, you will have to search for a video put out to smear Oath Keepers.

(emphasis in bold by Oath Keepers not me)

To show they will not fall under the leadership of the 'FBI infiltrators,' they tell their readers that no matter what Booda Bear says and no matter what is right in front of their eyes  they, the Oathe Keepers are still at the Bundy ranch :

Know this. Oath Keepers has a contingent on the ground there right now working in an Oath Keepers-directed security op. I’m told my good friend from Kalispell, Montana, Brother Paul Stramer, is down there with equipment for comms at present. And Sheriff Mack sends me this word regarding the continuing stream of Sheriffs who will come to the ranch to stand with the Bundys:  

“I spoke with SR yesterday. There were no wounded. Bundys are still happy with all help. Yes, we are still sending in Sheriffs. Christopher will be there tomorrow.” - Sheriff Mack to Elias Alias [Oath Keepers] April 28 2014

(italics by Oath Keepers but bold emphasis by me)

OMG!!! Sheriff Mack wrote "There were no wounded."  -- there were no wounded because it's a pretend war!

By the way, Sheriff Mack is the chickenshit whose strategy was to use women and daughters as human shields so they could get shot first.

MACK: “It was a tactical plot ... tactically speaking, if they’re going to start killing people, I’m sorry, but to show the world how ruthless these people are, women needed to be the first ones shot ...I would have put my own wife or daughters there, and I would have been screaming bloody murder to watch them die ... But the best ploy would be to have had women at the front. Because, one, I don’t think they would have shot them. And, two, if they had, it would have been the worst thing that we could have shown to the rest of the world, that these ruthless cowards hired by the federal government will do anything.”

On the Oath Keeper's facebook page someone asked who the guy in the video was that said Oath Keepers were lucky they weren't shot in the back. Oath Keeper replied:

That is Ryan Payne[,] who the leader of the III% movement, Mike Vanderboegh, recognized immediately as a Govt plant. Read what Mike has to say about him in the article posted further up in the comments. He tried, we tried, to warn the Bundys about this man. They are trying to drive the OK [Oath Keepers] off the ranch because we are the only thing preventing a raid on them by the Feds that is going to come from the inside, just like they did to Ed and Elaine Brown years ago when they refused to pay taxes. They posed as supporters, got inside their home, and arrested them. Right now, the OKs are what is preventing that. We are still at the ranch running patrols and security to protect the Bundys from the snakes in their midst.

(emphasis in bold is mine)

ooooooowwwww ... we don't like them "Govt plants" -- be afraid, be very afraid.

The Oath Keepers, I guess, are trying to get 'welfare ranch privileges' back so they're sucking up to the criminal old man Bundy like crazy and on their website they wrote:

We understand that the Bundy affair is classic and that Mr. Bundy himself is a patriarch of our American heritage and as such he is to be protected by the people at all costs.

(emphasis mine)

LMFAO ... Bundy "a patriarch of our American heritage ... he is to be protected by the people at all costs."

You can't make this crap up.

These are groups of people who are completely detached from reality and whose entire lives swirl around paranoid fantasy and fear.  That's what allows them to completely reject the actual words of the US Constitution and proclaim that the US Government is not sovereign, states are not sovereign but we are sovereign citizens.  And, more importantly, it is what allows them to hate real America, wage war with real America and 'love' the non-existent America that they've created in their own minds. (There's a good write-up on what it anti-American, fake patriots mean by the term 'sovereign citizen' here.)

Gawker has a video of Ryan Paine explaining why he's a sovereign citizen

(timestamp 4:41)

RYAN PAINE: The Supreme Court has ruled that the citizens are the sovereign in America. The state is not the sovereign, the Federal Government is not the sovereign. The citizen is the sovereign. You can't trespass on the citizen.

To summarize:

One group, the militia, are telling their followers that 'Oath Keepers are not at the ranch and won't be let back on the ranch' -- while at the same time and without any photographic proof at all -- the Oath Keepers tell their followers 'don't believe your own eyes, it's those militia FBI infiltrators deceiving you, not your eyes we are still at the ranch and will stay at the ranch' and, naturally, their followers believe them. SMH.

Pssst ... they're not really at the ranch.  How do I know this?

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO TEAMSARAH4CHOICE ON WED APR 30, 2014 AT 07:03 AM PDT.
ALSO REPUBLISHED BY SHUT DOWN THE NRA.
TAGS

Salon [1] / By Paul Rosenberg [2]

'You Need to Die': Cliven Bundy and Violent Militias Still Terrorizing Utah, Nevada

May 14, 2014 |

When Cliven Bundy decided to share with America “one more thing I know about the Negro,” most people immediately assumed his 15 minutes of fame we up—particularly when Donald Sterling quickly overshadowed him—and they were probably right.

But that hardly means that nothing significant has happened around Bundy since. Quite the opposite.

The explosion of attention he garnered does not come out of nowhere, it comes out of decades of political organizing, theorizing and scheming. And what’s been happening in and around the Bundy Ranch over the past month seems sure to shape the further evolution, not just of the hard right fringes from which he and his close defenders hail, but the much wider range of rightwing political culture which sympathetically supported him, and still feels “he had a point.”

In fact, the first violent fruits of that further evolution may be just around the corner, as the increased threats have already begun to fly—almost comically in internal battles between different factions at Bundy’s ranch, but also with serious menace directed against Bureau of Land Management personnel in neighboring Utah.

But, most important of all, the outbreak of violence between Bundy supporters—including threats of shooting one another—dramatically illustrates the utter foolishness of the “good man with a gun” formulation.  It’s not like this should be a stunning revelation. The American South—a classic “honor culture”—has always been bedeviled by high levels of violence in which both parties clearly saw themselves as good. Indeed they were fighting precisely to defend their good name, their reputation, their honor.  That legacy is alive and well in the militia movement of today… and it threatens to overspill its banks and flood the rest of America, if we let it.

Here, then, is a quick rundown of what’s happened since the spotlight shifted:

Bundy’s land claims were revealed as bogus. Even though it’s legally irrelevant to owing grazing fees, Cliven Bundy had claimed that he should be exempt, because of “”ancestral rights,” claiming that his family had worked the land since the 1870s, well before the BLM came into existence. But a report from KLAS-TV in Las Vegas [3] revealed that even this excuse was pure fabrication on Bundy’s part. His family had actually purchased the land in 1948 from Raoul and Ruth Leavitt, according to Clark County property records.

Response to intimidation of the community: Late last month, Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nevada, sent a letter to Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie,Fox-5 Las Vegas reported [4], concerning the militia members who remained in Bunkerville at and around the Bundy ranch. Horsford cited claims thatarmed militia members had set up checkpoints where they required residents to prove they live in the area before being allowed to pass, and have also established a presence along highways and roads, as well as in community areas, including churches and schools. Later statements by Bundy and his supporters inadvertently buttressed these claims–in part because Bundy has no grasp of the difference between public and private land–though it’s not clear how widespread such menacing activities were. In the letter, Horsford said, “I am greatly concerned about the safety and well-being of my constituents after meeting with local community members this past week. I urge Sheriff Gillespie to investigate these reports, as this sort of intimidation cannot be tolerated.”

Horsford was careful to strike a balanced tone. “We must respect individual constitutional liberties, but residents of and visitors to Clark County should not be expected to live under the persistent watch of an armed militia,” he wrote. “Residents have expressed their desire to see these groups leave their community. I urge you to investigate these reports and to work with local leaders to ensure that their concerns are addressed in a manner that allows the community [to] move forward without incident.”

Negative impacts were felt in nearby Mesquite, according to areport from KLAS-TV [5], where militiamen reportedly threatened people, and businesses claimed to have lost over $100,000 because of their presence, including a local hotel forced to evacuate all of its clients one evening due to a bomb threat. The hotel also received at least nine threatening calls after it allowed BLM rangers to stay there. If they weren’t kicked out, the callers threatened, the hotel “would not be standing in the morning.”

Violent internal split, with threats of shooting among Bundy supporters: Around the same time, awild, paranoid rumor spread throughout the camp that Attorney General Eric Holder was preparing a drone strike against them. On April 30, David Neiwert, at The Southern Poverty Law Center’sHatewatch blog [6] described what happened next:

Apparently, someone within one of the major factions at the camp, the Oath Keepers, relayed word of the imminent drone attack to his leaders. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes responded by pulling his people out of what they called “the kill zone” (the area the supposed drone would be striking). When the other militiamen learned that the Oath Keepers had pulled out, they were outraged.

As you can see in the video below, the angry militiamen – led by a Montana “Patriot” named Ryan Payne, who has been acting as the spokesman for the militiamen at the ranch – held an impromptu gathering at the camp to discuss the situation. They openly talk about shooting Rhodes and other Oath Keepers leaders – because in their view, the Oath Keepers’ actions constituted “desertion” and “cowardice” – and describe how “the whole thing is falling apart over there.” At the end, they vote unanimously to oust the Oath Keepers, or at least its leadership, from the Bundy Ranch camp.

And on May 2, Neiwert reported further on how the two factions nearly came to a shoot-out (“Militiamen and Oath Keepers Drew Weapons, Threatened to Kill Each Other [7]”), and how some actual physical violence occurred, “when angry young men knocked two elderly veterans, including Steve Homan, to the ground.” Toward the end of his report, he noted:

We saw the same kind of macho radicalism duringthe April 12 confrontation [8] with Bureau of Land Management and other law-enforcement officers – though it was somewhat obscured from public view.

A remarkable retrospective piece [9] on the standoff from KLAS-TV laid this reality bare. It revealed that the situation came within a hair’s breadth of becoming an all-out gun battle which the gathered “Patriots” defending Bundy seemed determined – indeed, outright eager – to have.

Investigation of illegal acts: On April 30, A KLAS-TV report, “Police say Bundy ranch protesters not off the hook [10]” gave the first clear public indication that multiple acts of lawlessness during the standoff would not go unpunished:

“They’re armed, they have an agenda, and they’re committed to whatever they believe in, no backing down. One or two of them would never have done what they did–point weapons at us–but when you have 300-400 and they can be anonymous in a crowd, you get caught up in that,” Sgt. Jenkins said.

Lombardo confirms that Metro developed a lot of intelligence about militia members who were present. Those who aimed their guns at officers will be dealt with.

“Yes, there will be consequences, definitely. That is unacceptable behavior. If we let it go, it will continue into the future,” Lombardo said.

Law enforcement sources told us that federal officials are preparing to move against Cliven Bundy, but they might wait months until things die down before making their move.

And, on May 8, the Las Vegas Review-Journalreported [11] that the FBI had opened a criminal investigation as well, according to Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie.

Threatened spread of violent confrontations: On May 7, the Salt Lake Tribune reported,

“BLM workers on alert after wrangler threatened with gun on I-15 [12].” During the incident:

The men, wearing hoods, held up a sign, apparently scrawled on a piece of paper, that read, “You need to die.” One of the men pointed what appeared to be a Glock handgun at the wrangler.

The wrangler tried to make out a license plate number, but the plate had been covered with duct tape, Reid said.

The next weekend, Bundy supporters showed up elsewhere in Utah, once again challenging the BLM. The site was Utah’s Recapture Canyon, an eleven-mile stretch of federal land that is home to Native American archeological sites which the BLM has declared off-limits to ATVs since 2007, because ATVs were damaging the land and folks using them were vandalizing Native American sites. San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, was organizing the protest, intended to include illegal riding in the prohibited area. Lyman doesn’t think the BLM has the authority to protect cultural resources, and saidthe goal of the ride [13] was to reassert county jurisdiction in the face of federal “overreach,” according to the Salt Lake Tribune, a goal that echoes Cliven Bundy, who suddenly endorsed the ride just days before it was scheduled. Hence, Ryan and Aamon Bundy, two of Cliven Bundy’s sons and several militiamen showed up in support. Lyman was involved in a delicate dance, trying to strike the exact same themes as Bundy, while presenting himself as more sober and restrained. Right. There was a time not so long ago when that was Bundy’s game, too.

Lessons Learned?

If we can summarize what’s happened since the spotlight moved on, we see the ongoing spread of lies and violence on the one hand—which is completely unsurprising. The almost-shooting war that Bundy supporters got themselves into is precisely the reason that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what they think it means: As John Locke’s social contract theory explained [14], civil society was created because individual force cannotguarantee peace and security—even among the supposedly like-minded. Hence, the turning of violence against one another was just as predictable as its threatened spread to Utah as well.

On the other hand, we see a deliberately restrained, but methodical law enforcement process under way. Let’s hope it stays that way, because nothing damages the law as badly as those who abuse its authority, or use it recklessly. But let’s also hope they don’t take too long in beginning to bring folks to justice. Hatred, lies and violence already have too big a head start. We don’t need to let them get any farther ahead.

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Cliven Bundy [16]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/you-need-die-cliven-bundy-and-violent-militias-still-terrorizing-utah-nevada

Links:

http://www.alternet.org/22-crazy-right-wing-delusions-about-absurd-cliven-bundy-stand

WASHINGTON -- Americans for Prosperity Nevada, the state affiliate of the Koch Brothers-backed group, appears to have hastily deleted social media posts expressing support for Cliven Bundy, the renegade rancher who exposed himself as a racist in recent press conferences.

A tweet sent by AFP Nevada on April 10 urging followers to read more about the #BundyBattle, which involves Bundy's refusal to pay fines for allowing his cattle to graze on public land, has been deleted. A Facebook graphic that the group posted criticizing the Bureau of Land Management for enforcing grazing laws against Bundy has similarly disappeared.

Previously, the page read: "The BLM spent HOW MUCH to round up cattle? ONE MILLION DOLLARS." As of Friday afternoon, it reads: "This content is currently unavailable"

AFP Nevada, a anti-government, libertarian organization, did not immediately return a request for comment. But the group is the latest to join the massive, frantic stampede of political organizations and media figures distancing themselves from Bundy in the wake of his comments. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) both condemned the rancher's remarks, and various Fox News personalities called them repugnant as well.

hmmn http://gopthedailydose.com/2014/04/10/not-a-tortoise-fracking-millions-behind-blm-evicting-nv-rancher-blm-wants-that-land/

==

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Land_Management‎

Wikipedia

:{The :{Bureau:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of :{Land Management:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (:{BLM:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:) is an agency within the United States .... Since the Reagan years of the 1980s, :{Republicans:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: have emphasized local .... and:{administrative:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: provisions of the :{BLM:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and other statutes under the United ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: bush

maroonedinmarin.blogspot.com/.../texas-ag-greg-abbott-to-obamas-land....‎

:{3 days ago - After their attempt at grabbing :{land:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: from Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, the Obama Regime's :{Bureau:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of :{Land Management:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (:{BLM:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:) is looking to grab ... Texas Attorney General (and :{GOP:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: nominee for Governor) Greg Abbott is ... “This is the latest line of attack by the Obama :{Administration:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: where it seems like ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

crooksandliars.com/.../rick-perry-defends-cliven-bundy...‎

Crooks and Liars

:{3 days ago - Rick Perry Defends Cliven Bundy: Claiming Obama :{Administration:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: 'Acting Imperialistically'. By John Amato ... Cockfighting Upends Kentucky :{GOP:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Senate Hopeful .... :{BLM:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, :{Bureau:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of :{Land Management:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Cliven Bundy, Militia movement, Rick Perry ... Ruddy: Jeb :{Bush:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Rises With Immigration Stance. Sens.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

www.mnn.com/eco.../bureau-land-management‎

Mother Nature Network

:{The U.S. :{Bureau:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of :{Land Management:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (:{BLM:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:) is responsible for carrying out a variety of programs for the :{management:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and ... :{Republicans:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: take aim at wild :{lands:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: in budget deal ... Obama :{administration:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: reverses :{Bush:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: wilderness policy.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

interesting contrast: http://www.alternet.org/heres-real-david-vs-goliath-story-between-ranchers-and-feds

==on W. Silcock:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1971 - 1973Curt Berklund.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Curt Berklund:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1973 - 1977Frank Gregg.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Frank Gregg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1978 - 1981Robert F. Burford.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Robert F. Burford:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1981 - 1989No image.svg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Cy Jamison:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1989 - 1992No image.svg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Jim Baca:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1993 - 1994DombeckMichael.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Mike Dombeck:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:(Acting)1994 - 1996Pat Shea 1998.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Pat Shea:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1997 - 1998Tom Fry 1999-4-20.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Tom Fry:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:1998 - 2000Kathleen Clarke (Bureau of Land Management).jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Kathleen Clarke:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:2000 - 2006James Caswell - blm.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:James Caswell:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:2007 - 2009Robert Abbey 2010-09-15.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Robert Abbey:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:2009 - 2012[15]Mike Pool 2009-02-18.jpg:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:Mike Pool (acting):{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:2012–2013Neil Kornze (acting):{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:2013–2014Neil Kornze:{ :(style="white-space:pre"):}:2014–present==

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/04/10/right-wing-media-are-throwing-gas-on-a-ranchers/198841

Right-wing media are fanning the flames of a conflict between a federal agency and their new hero -- a scofflaw Nevada rancher who's threatening a violent range war against the federal government.

Cliven Bundy, a cattle rancher in Nevada, has been fighting the government over grazing rights on public land for nearly a quarter century. In 1993, Bundy began refusing to pay government fees required to allow his cattle to exploit public lands. In 1998, the government issued a court order telling Bundy to remove his cows from the land, as part of an effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise located there. And in July 2013, a federal court ordered Bundy to get his cattle off public land within 45 days or they would be confiscated. The confiscation began this month, and the cattle will be sold to pay off the $1 million in fees and trespassing fines Bundy owes.

Conservative media have held the confiscation out as a big government invasion of private property rights and have repeatedly hyped the rancher and his family as victims being intimidated by a heavily armed force of federal agents who are escalating the situation into the realm of notorious and deadly standoffs like Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Fox News hosted the rancher on the April 9 edition of Hannity, where Sean Hannity sympathized with Bundy's claims against the government and argued that allowing Bundy's cattle to graze on public lands "keeps the price of meat down for every American consumer." 

Fox & Friends highlighted the situation and complained about the protections for the desert tortoise. Co-host Brian Kilmeade said, "We're not anti-turtle, but we are pro-logic and tradition." 

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck's TheBlaze.com played up the fact that the federal agents confiscating Bundy's cattle were armed. Alex Jones' Infowars.com posited that the government was attempting to "enslave us in an [United Nations] Agenda 21 future where we have no property and no rights." During an April 9 edition of Jones' conspiracy theory radio show, Jones said of Bundy, "So your bottom line, like Paul Revere, you're making your stand, you're telling folks we're being overrun by an out of control tyranny."

National Review Online's Kevin Williamson called the presence of armed agents "inflammatory" and described the government's actions as a "siege." The conservative American Thinker accused Attorney Gen. Eric Holder of enforcing the law against Bundy for racial reasons. 

But if anyone is waging a campaign of intimidation, it's Bundy and his family, who have repeatedly threatened violence, invoked revolutionary rhetoric, and issued public statements making known that they own firearms and appear willing to use them.

...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_Rebellion

==

For commentators who claim to despise lawlessness and who have attacked the Obama administration for allegedly feeding disorder and politicizing it, conservatives were quick to embrace a lawless Nevada rancher who for two decades has refused to pay federal grazing fees on public land and is now promoting his cattle crusade as a war against the federal government.

According to the right wing media, paying the obvious penalty for openly refusing to obey the law for decades suddenly translates into victimhood for rancher Cliven Bundy and "harassment" by the government, as conservative commentator Dana Loesch tried to spin away Bundy's contempt for law and order.

Aside from ignoring the law, Bundy and his armed, anti-government supporters have repeatedly threatened violence and fanned the flames of confrontation with revolutionary, insurrectionist rhetoric, like declaring a "Range War." ("Serious bloodshed was narrowly avoided," the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported last week from the site of the flash point.)

All of the incendiary rhetoric and the loaded allegations about a tyrannical government has been marketed and promoted by Fox News and the rest of the conservative media, which claims to revere America as a nation of laws; the same Fox News that declared war on Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2011 and condemned them for being lawless. ("Domestic terrorists"!)

But now, suddenly the rules of engagement have shifted. Bundy is a right-wing hero and a massive Fox News flip-flop has taken place.

The facts of the Bundy case are not in dispute.

Since 1993, Bundy has refused to pay grazing fees for his use of 600,000 acres of public land. Bundy does not recognize the unambiguous authority of the federal government to administer the lands. In July 2013, a federal court ordered the defiant rancher to remove his cattle from the land or they would be confiscated to pay off the $1 million in fees and trespassing fines Bundy owes. He disobeyed, and confiscation of the cows began last week, before being halted because of the Bureau of Land Management's "serious concerns about the safety of employees and members of the public."

Even Fox's Megyn Kelly conceded that legally, Bundy "doesn't have a leg to stand on."

Nonetheless, the stampede of support for lawbreaker Bundy has been nearly all encompassing on the right. National Review Online's Kevin Williamson called the presence of armed agents "inflammatory" and condemned the government's actions as a "siege," while The Drudge Report recklessly hyped the growing fear of a violent standoff between anti-government militia members and federal forces.

On Fox, Sean Heannity has served as ringmaster for the insurrectionist circus that unfolded in Nevada and Hannity has clearly singled out law enforcement as the enemy. "Not once did Hannity mention concern for the well-being of law enforcement officials," noted the Fox-watching site NewsHounds. "Not once did Hannity discuss the federal government without demonizing them and suggesting that they were behaving in a criminal, fascist manner that deserved to be fought."

Yet that's the same Hannity who's been part of the right-wing campaign to denounce Obama for being outside the law; for his alleged "pattern of lawlessness."

"Obama's Politicized, Lawless Executive Branch," was the headline to David Limbaugh's TownHall.com column just last week. "Obama Adds Irrationality To Lawlessness -- While Threatening Prosecution," came from National Review Online's Andrew McCarthy this winter. ("It is wearying to catalogue President Obama's lawlessness," he complained.)

And from Rush Limbaugh in February [emphasis added]:

What do we do to stop somebody as lawless, some president as lawless this?  What do we do?  Nobody knows.  Nobody knows what to do.  Nobody knows how to stop him giving away money.  Nobody knows how to beat him giving away money.  Nobody knows how to deal with a guy who makes up the law every day as he gets up. We've never confronted this before. We've never had a president who is so lawless. We've never had a president who is so unconcerned with the Constitution.

That central attack theme has been repeated hundreds (thousands?) of times across the right-wing media since Obama was first sworn in and has come to define the conservative opposition to Obama: The current President of the United States, who happens to be an attorney and a former law school professor, shows no obedience to American laws or its courts, which is why Fox News, for instance, has repeatedly wondered if Obama should be impeached for his alleged lawbreaking.

Someone so arrogantly lawless that he pays no mind to U.S. jurisprudence? Kind of like a Nevada rancher who's been in open defiance for more than 20 years and views himself as being immune to federal law? 

How can you tell the embrace of Bundy and his lawbreaking crusade is so obviously driven by partisan politics? Just recall the Occupy Wall Street movement and how conservative pundits uniformly howled their indignation. Why? Because left-leaning activists were breaking the law.

At National Review, editor Rich Lowry warned, "It's become clear during the past few weeks that there is a lawlessness at the heart of Occupy Wall Street."

Lowry was amazed at how activists refused to obey orders from police:

When asked to do something by an officer of the law,the instinct of most people is to comply, especially if they are violating a rule. The instinct of many of the Occupy protesters is to resist, then inflate their arrests or clashes with the police into a monumental struggle with the forces of oppression.

Keep in mind Lowy's claim that "most people" comply with officers of the law while watching this clip from a Nevada confrontation over the weekend, dubbed a "Ranch Riot" by a Bundy sympathizer. In it, pretesters not only fail to comply with "officers of the law," would-be militia members rain down epithets on law enforcement officials, denouncing various officers as being a "terrorist," "loser," "chickenshit," and a "fucking pussy." (Lots of the name calling starts at the 5:00 mark.)

mojo

Conservative activists and media outlets have generally embraced the cause of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who inspired a gang of protesters—many of them armed—to face off with federal law enforcement this weekend. But one figure on the right has taken a surprising stand against Bundy's supporters: former Fox News host Glenn Beck.

On Saturday, a large group of anti-government protesters converged on a Bureau of Land Management base camp in rural Nevada to protest the federal government's seizure of Bundy's cows. Bundy had for years grazed hundreds of cattle on protected lands controlled by the federal government and refused to pay the resulting court-ordered fines. This month, after nearly 20 years of consistently beating Bundy in court, the BLM moved to confiscate his cattle. A judge ordered Bundy not to physically interfere. In response, Bundy assembled protesters to confront the BLM officers who were holding his livestock.

After a dramatic, two-day standoff, federal officers backed down and handed the cows over to Bundy to avoid violence. Astonishing photos from the scene show protesters perched on a highway overpass and hunkered down in the brush with long-range weapons; one photo appears to show a man on the bridge aiming down at the BLM base camp.

The involvement of armed militiamen—and Bundy's promise to "do whatever it takes" to reclaim his cattle—doesn't appear to phase conservative activists who have turned Bundy into a cause célèbre. Before this weekend's confrontation, National Review Online, Fox & Friends,and American Thinker all blamed the government for mounting tensions. Two groups affiliated with Americans for Prosperity, a political organization funded primarily by the Koch brothers, spent the weekend tweeting their support for Bundy, Media Matters reported. Sean Hannity, who on Fridayhailed Bundy as a capitalist hero—"When your cattle graze there, that keeps the price of meat down for every American consumer"—invited Bundy back on the air Monday for a second, easygoing interview in which he made only glancing reference to the armed confrontation.

Beck, though, in an episode of his show broadcast Monday, said he fully supports Bundy's principles but couldn't look past his supporters:

The problem here is that Bundy hasn't been all that clear on this…He's a rancher. And so he's not used to making his sound bite case in this sound bite world. But the problem with that lack of clarity is some of the supporters that he's attracting. He is drawing in the decent, small government proponents from groups such as the tea party…I know there's some people that listen [to] and watch me. And they are sick of the government regulations hampering themselves, small businesses, farming, I'm with you on that.

But when you're not really super clear, it also draws another element, drawing in the violent, anti-government groups. The, I think, right's version of Occupy Wall Street. We did some research online on PsyID [a social-media analysis tool] today, and found that there's about 10 to 15 percent of the people who are talking about this online that are truly frightening. They don't care what the facts are—they just want a fight. And you see it in some of these pictures.

At this point, video played behind Beck of protesters scuffling with federal officers.

I don't know who these people are. They all might be great. But here they are, they're acting, they're enraged, they're enraged. And they're confronting the federal government officials. I get that. But this is not the way to win…I want to be clear, 100 percent clean on one thing all of us should agree on, and unfortunately, I don't believe we do, both left and right. And that is, we need to agree on, we condemn those who use violence. Inciting violence doesn't solve anything. I vehemently denounce anyone who even hints at such tactics…People can spot anger and vengeance from a mile away. And when I saw that video where they were lunging and jumping at the agents, calling them scumbags, I thought, this is our side's Occupy Wall Street. It's happening all over again, and it will end the same way.

Beck didn't specifically call out the armed protesters, and theBlaze, a website that is part of his media empire, played up the federal government's role in bringing the crisis to a head. Beck claims the facts of the federal government's actions against Bundy are "convoluted" (when they're pretty well established) and equates heavily armed protesters with Occupy Wall Street. But there's no doubt that he took a stand against the extreme elements among Bundy's supporters. And when Glenn Beck approximates a reasonable position on the same night that a blood moon rises, you've got to second-guess the folks who say the world isn't coming to an end.

THU MAY 01, 2014 AT 07:29 AM PDT

UPDATE: With Hands on Gun Bundy Militia Told Us "I'm Gonna Kill You" [ACTION NEEDED]

byTeamSarah4ChoiceFollow

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Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes put out a "Debriefing" video where they claim that the Bundy Militia put their hands on their guns and said "I'm gonna kill you."

At timestamp 14:32 Stewart Rhodes tells that the Bundy Militia physically assaulted two of the Oath Keepers.

[Timestamp 14:32]

RHODES: So after we told our guys that -- we reiterated our point to -- if you're gonna be there ya gotta be dug in and if you're not gonna be there you're gonna deploy out as Scouts-- those two things. So then what happened after that is he had -- he was assaulted.  Tell em what happened.

STEVE: Well like I said there was quite a few people comin in ta CP in order ta get more information -- cuz we were tryin ta get em out.  A couple of trucks drove inta the yard -- uh -- guys started jumpin out and I could see right away when they were gettin out of the truck they were very agitated.  We had one of the men run out toward our car.  I was standing in front of one of our cars John Bidler, the Connecticut President was standing over by the driver's door -- the gentelman came and he - uh - all of the sudden the gentleman started runnin toward me and hit me right in the chest with his forearm and -- uh -- put me down.

RHODES: That was Jack, that's one of Jerry DeLamus' guys from New Hampshire. That's who did that.  Dropped you in the dirt right?

STEVE: He dropped me down and he immediately went to John Bidler and -- uh -- basically done the same -- he just physically threw him ta the ground.

RHODES:  So he came and forearmed you in the chest?

At timestamp 20:49 Stewart Rhodes says that Bundy's militia put their hand on their gun and said "I'm gonna kill you."

[Timestamp 20:49]

STEWART RHODES ... now when [John] Bidler was dropped on his butt-- John Bidler-- another guy -- some Mountain Man militia guy put his hand on his gun and said "I dare ya to draw -- draw Mother Fucker I'm gonna kill ya." I'm sorry to cuss but that's what he said.  So they were being threatened.  Guys with hands on their guns threatening them.  That's why we told them [Steve & John] to get out of there.  We knew the situation was this close [signals an inch] from being a gun fight, right there inside the camp.

Then at Timestamp 37:28 Stewart Rhodes said a different Bundy Militia dude pulled an AR on another Oath Keeper and the Oath Keeper almost had to kill him.

RHODES:  ... and this is the tip of the iceberg of the cluster out there.  One of our guys from Montana, Rick Delap, who was there from the beginning he's been out there for 2 weeks in the dirt.  The day of this confrontation [with Steve & John Bidler] I come to find out he [Rick Delap] had to draw on somebody.  Two of the Mountain men guys came up to him -- were aggressing on him. Then one of them ran back to his vehicle and grabbed an AR and came back with an AR in his hand and Rick had to draw on him. And those two ran off.  That was this close [hand signals an inch] from Rick having to shoot that ding-a-ling.  If that guy had raised his barrel, Rick would have had no choice but to shoot him.

Keep in mind, the Bundy militia who are physically assaulting and drawing ARs and other weapons on the Oath Keepers are the same Bundy militia who Nevada Congressman, Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), was talking about when he contacted law enforcement saying supporters of rancher Cliven Bundy have set up checkpoints for drivers’ “residency” before letting them pass.

This video shows crimes are being committed on the Bundy Ranch and those crimes need to be investigated.  (Crime of: Assault and pointing weapons at people without being in self-defense)

I think this video should be sent to Rep. Horsford and should be preserved as evidence to be given to Law Enforcement so that Law Enforcement can investigate and so they can do what they need to do to keep the residence of Bunkerville and the surrounding areas safe from these lunatic gun-nuts.

By the way: The Oath Keepers are just as dangerous as the Bundy Militia, see my UPDATE below the orange squiggle.

ACTION NEEDED: Contact Senator Harry Reid's office & Rep. Steven Horsford office and tell them the Title of the youtube video is: "Oath Keepers Bundy Ranch DeBrief."

Give them the timestamps of: the crime of physical assault and pulling guns on each other without being in the act of self-defense.

The more people who call, the more apt we are to get the criminal allegations in this video investigated. - thanks.

CONTACT:

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada

* Washington DC: Phone: 202-224-3542

(you'll get a recording so click 1 on your phone & then wait for a rep from Reid's office to answer)

* Las Vegas: Phone: 702-388-5020

Rep. Steven Horsford

* Washington DC : Phone: 202-225-9894

* North Las Vegas, NV: Phone: 702-802-4500

UPDATE:

Oath Keepers are just as dangerous to society as the Bundy Militia.  Right Wing Watch is reporting that Oath Keeper member, Mike Vanderboegh, who is also leader of the militia group Three Percenters gave a speech to the Bundy Militia and warned that the country is “staring a civil war in its bloody face.”

VANDERBOEGH: "All over this country, we are still staring civil war in its bloody face, ... Sen. Harry Reid is promising us all civil war on a vast scale, because state-sponsored violence is they only way they can win an argument with free people, especially free people who are armed and who are willing to use those arms in defense of liberty.”

Right Wing Watch goes on to report:

Vanderboegh then pulled out a skull and declared that he would present it to Reid as the “2014 Award for Incitement to Civil War.”

He added: “Don’t poke the wolverine with a sharp stick, Harry, unless you want your balls ripped off.”

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/01/1296091/-Oath-Keepers-Bundy-Militia-Put-Their-Hands-On-Their-Guns-Told-Us-I-m-Gonna-Kill-you#