We drove by Malheur Wildlife Refuge today and it reminded me of one of the stupider episodes in recent history: the occupation of that place by the Bundy family and their acolytes.
Some followers of Ihe Bundys took over the headquarters of the refuge in 2016 as a protest over the 2014 action by the BLM to finally make Clive, the patriarch of this backward bunch of lawbreakers, pay for the grazing rights for the cattle he had been running on BLM land. The BLM let him do it for 20 years, but they finally presented him with a bill for $1 million, and when he couldn’t pay, they rounded up his cattle. For those of you who haven’t lived in the West, National Forest and BLM land is open for grazing (so watch where you step when you’re hiking a trail) but ranchers need to pay for grazing rights. The Bundys decided that the land was theirs and they didn’t need to pay the government anything.
Like a lot of other nutty fuckers who want the right to public land for nothing, the Bundys had cooked up some horseshit justification for using thousands of acres of government land for free. Once he had spend a huge amount of money on lawyers to lose, repeatedly, in court, the BLM rounded up and confiscated his cattle.
In retaliation, the Bundy followers took over the Malheur refuge in Oregon, occupying the headquarters building. The feds generally let them occupy it, but at one point in the standoff, one of the occupiers had an encounter with a federal roadblock and was shot by a federal agent. The feds didn’t cover themselves in glory here — one FBI agent ended up being prosecuted — but overall, at some point armed occupiers of federal land reap what they sow. Here’s the (extensive) Wikipedia entry on it.
I wondered what Ammon Bundy, who’s taken over the family grift from his father Clive, has been up to. The answer is, his usual bullshit:
Longtime anti-government figure Ammon Bundy was arrested in Iron County on Wednesday for driving an unregistered vehicle — a requirement he argues violates his “inalienable right” to travel freely.
In protest, Bundy later walked 8 miles down Interstate 15. He told The Tribune that he will not register his vehicle, but will appear in court.
That story was from a little over a week ago.
The Bundys have gotten nothing but leniency from the courts and the government. Just imagine if a black man led a movement that encouraged his followers to stop paying taxes, and imagine further if that movement took over some government building in a big city. The SWAT team would be dropping bombs on them in hours. They wouldn’t be given the white glove treatment that the Bundys have received. It’s time that we started giving white extremism the same treatment as other extremists. These people are the worst of us, and should be treated as such.
