muledouche fails to see that their "message" is being laughed at everywhere except with other Obama hating militia types.
And of course, sean hannity.
One interesting take on how the US media would cover the Oregon siege if it happened in another country...
If It Happened There: Armed Rebel Faction Occupies Government Building
by Joshua Keating
The latest installment of a continuing series in which American events are described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events in other countries.
BURNS, United States—An armed rebel group has seized control of a government building in the country’s sparsely populated northwest frontier territories. The ongoing standoff in Oregon state poses a serious challenge to the authority of the government in the capital, Washington, more than 2,000 miles away.
The militant faction, calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, is affiliated with a family clan known as the Bundys. Political power is often passed down through families in this heavily patriarchal society, and while the Bundys are not yet as powerful as well-known clans like the Bushes, Clintons, and Kochs, they have amassed a sizable arsenal of weaponry and gained a substantial number of loyal followers after another armed confrontation with the central government in 2014.
The Bundys are followers of Mormonism, a religious sect living primarily in America’s restive western regions with a history of persecution by America’s protestant-dominated government. However, scholars note that the vast majority of Mormons are peaceful and that the Bundys’ grievances do not appear to be religiously motivated.
Rather, the latest incident is rooted in a long-running conflict between pastoralist tribal groups and the central government. These tribes believe the traditional way of life they have practiced for centuries is under threat from a government that restricts their right to graze their herds of cattle where they please. While the latest standoff is related to a case involving another pastoralist family, the Hammonds, setting fire to forests owned by the government to acquire more grazing land, it likely reflects large prevailing anxieties among a portion of the citizenry over economic development, political centralization, and globalization. Experts believe conflicts over grazing land may only become more common and intensify thanks to the changing weather patterns caused by climate change.
The events in Oregon suggest that militant factions may be taking advantage of the power vacuum caused by America’s political dysfunction to increase their territorial control in areas where the government’s control is weaker. The U.S. central government has been paralyzed for years by feuding between the center-left Democratic Party, which controls the executive branch, and the center-right Republican Party, which dominates the legislature. The country’s traditional governing elite have also been threatened this year by the rise of oligarch Donald Trump and his ultranationalist, populist campaign for president.
In a bid to demonstrate his continued legitimacy, the country’s embattled President Barack Obama announced new firearms-control measures on Tuesday. The country is currently awash with high-powered weapons, which are designed primarily for military use, but have frequently fallen into the hands of anti-government extremists representing a number of religious and secular ideologies.
However, the president is acting solely on his own limited authority, and without the support of the legislature. With armed groups increasingly challenging his government, it’s unclear whether he still has the power to enforce his edicts.
http://www.vice.com/read/whats-really-going-on-in-that-occupied-wildlife-sanctuary-in-oregon-281
What Are Armed Militiamen Really Doing in That Oregon Wildlife Refuge?
By Mike Pearl, Staff Writer
January 6, 2016
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As you may have heard, earlier this week an armed militia group occupied a building on a federal wildlife preserve near Burns, Oregon. They were initially there in support of a local rancher and his son who ran afoul of the government after setting fire to roughly 140 acres of federal land, and now face some tough prison sentences. Included in the militia are relatives of another federal-government-hating rancher named Cliven Bundy.
By Tuesday night, the Oath Keepers, a militia group not linked to the occupation, were warning anyone with children to stay away from the wildlife reserve. The occupiers, meanwhile, were alternately announcing to the press that they'd leave when there was a plan in place to hand the federally owned land, known as the Malheur Wildlife Reserve, over to the local community, and boasting that there were federal warrants out for their arrests—and that they'd be waiting, armed, when federal agents arrived.
So what the hell is going on?
In the days leading up to the standoff, it appeared that the plan might have been to keep the federal government from hauling the local ranchers, Dwight and Steve Hammond, off to prison. The Hammonds were caught in a judicial clusterfuck involving minimum sentencing and the War on Terror, and the Bundys weren't happy to hear that they'd be doing five years of hard time for lighting fires on federal land in 2001 and 2006, in what the government claims was arson.
In November, the Bundys wrote on their family blog that "the incarceration of the Hammond family will spawn serious civil unrest." The militiamen's occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which appears to include at least three of Cliven's sons, is apparently the family's way of making good on that threat. Theoccupation echoes the standoff at theBundys' own ranch in April of 2014, when armed militias faced off against agents with the Bureau of Land Management, the culmination of two-decade legal spat over Cliven's unpaid grazing fees.
Unlike Bundy, the Hammonds are now in prison. To the dismay of militia groups like the Oath Keepers, the father and son turned down the generous offer to have armed insurgents protect them from the government's attempts to drag them to jail, and showed up Monday at a federal penitentiary in Southern California. Although they apparently were in contact with the Bundys before this week's events, the Hammonds have now made it clear they're not interested in the occupation of any wildlife refuge. So this isn't really about the Bundys keeping their kindred scofflaws out of the pen.
As in the Bundy Ranch standoff, the militiamen's main issue, at least nominally, seems to be land ownership, and specifically, the fact that the federal government owns the majority of the land in eleven western states, which is, to be fair, a shit ton of land. This fact is particularly irksome to ranchers like the Hammonds and the Bundys, who need lots of open space to graze livestock, and tend to take issue with the federal government using the land for things like, say, wildlife protection.
While lots of people in the West take issue with the feds controlling local natural resources, the Bundys and their allies take this view much further. Basically, Cliven—and presumably the Bundy sons that are now freezing their asses off in Oregon—think the federal government unlawfully seized the land from the state, and thatArticle 1, Section 8, Clause 17 of the US Constitution says the feds can't legally own all those huge tracts of land anyway.
This, of course, is why Bundy lets his cows graze on federal land that is technically reserved for a species of tortoise, while also refusing to pay the $1.2 million in grazing fees he owes the government because he doesn't believe the fees are valid. The 2014 standoff was sparked when BLM agents started seizing Bundy's cattle, but when the family and their militiamen advanced on the federal agents with firearms, the cattle were promptly surrendered. No blood was shed, and the Bundys can make a credible case that they won.
That victory no doubt bolstered the Bundys' feeling of moral certainty about their particularly screwy interpretation of the Constitution. Now with the Oregon occupation, his sons are apparently taking a victory lap.
The occupiers, who call themselves theCitizens for Constitutional Freedom, include other militia members who are not members of the Bundy family. But at this point, wedon't know very much about the non-Bundy members in its ranks, or even how many of them there actually are. According to Ammon Bundy's own headcount, there are about 150 people in the wildlife refuge, although more reliable estimates say it's more like 15 to 25.
Known sovereign state groups like the III Percenters, the Oath Keepers—who participated in the Bundy Ranch standoff—and the assorted West Coast militias operating under the aegis of the "Pacific Patriot Network" are beginning to distance themselves from the Malheur antics. One III Percentertold Reuters that Ammon Bundy "believes he's on a mission from God," and that to the Bundys, "what the Hammonds want and what the community wants is immaterial."
In addition to Ammon Bundy, the de facto leader, another high-ranking occupier is Ammon's brother Ryan. An Army veteran named Ryan Payne is another apparent ringleader of the group, and told The New York Times that he will occupy the refuge "for as long as it takes." An occupier named John Ritzheimer has participated in anti-Muslim rallies, according to the Los Angeles Times, and tried to recruit people to Oregon in a YouTube video, saying ,"We need real men here." Then there's the mysterious figure known only as "Captain Moroni"—a reference to the Book of Mormon—who says he's "willing to die here." A rancher from Arizona with the outrageous name of LaVoy Finicum says there are tons of occupiers, but they were hiding when reporters looked around.
Another occupier named Michael Stettler told The Washington Post that the group was mostly couch potatoes fielding phone calls from the media and watching Fox News, and that if push came to shove, "most of them couldn't even run a mile."
From time to time, people do show up and join the occupation, but firsthand accounts say their arrivals are disorganized and awkward.
Ammon Bundy tried to win over the community of Burns, at a news conference on Sunday."This refuge here is rightfully owned by the people and we intend to use it," he said. He went on to say that he wanted the newly liberated land to be "a unified body of people that understand the principles of the Constitution."
Despite the tantalizing promise of countless acres of federal land, the people of Burns, Oregon, population 3,000,hardly seem thrilled about the occupation. And the militiamen haven't been great at outreach so far. In one baffling incident, they showed up at a yard sale and got into a shouting match with the elderly mother of the local sheriff, and then later marched into the sheriff's office to tattle on her for threatening them.
Even the members of the community sympathetic to the militia's opposition to federal land ownership seem to doubt Ammon Bundy's competence, and the wisdom of seizing a federal building. Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward has asked them to go home and be with their families, which must have stung, because county sheriffs are some of the only authority figures the Bundys respect.
But while their tactics might be questionable, and their approach disorganized, their basic argument against federal land management speaks to a broader movement that has been gaining steam in the West in recent years. The Bundys have attended rowdy anti-BLM events, and they haven't all been spontaneous, grassroots rallies. At least one was organized by Phil Lyman, a Utah county commissioner known for his anti-BLM activities.
Lyman is not the only member of a government agency who would like to see federal land handed over to the states. In Utah, for instance, state legislators are fighting hard to seize land back from the feds. Legislators in Idaho and Nevada have made similar attempts. These efforts have been criticized by environmentalists as land grabs, but to date, none of these state pols has gone all Dog Day Afternoon on a wildlife preserve.
Publications like InfoWars and Zero Hedge—the ones often lumped into the "conspiracy" category—are, of course, watching the events in Oregon closely, and as outlets that reliably post material critical of federal land rights, exploring their take on events can be illuminating. A blog post by Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden called the Oregon Occupation "a terrible plan that we might be stuck with," and games out what might happen if the feds try to take out the occupiers. The answer, it seems, is that it would be inauspicious start to a nonetheless necessary revolution.
"If the Feds use brutality to handle the Oregon conflict, it will indeed 'kick-off.' There wont be any way to stop it," Durden writes. "Just don't get too excited, folks. This is no Lexington or Concord. I really don't know what to call it." writes Durden.
For their part, the BLM—or any other federal agency for that matter—probably doesn't want a shootout with the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. The government's botched handling of past sieges, like Ruby Ridge or the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, have been disastrous, leaving behind unnecessary body counts and deep, meaningful scars in the cultural imagination.
It might not come to that. Ammon Bundy has already said he's willing leave if the locals tell him "directly," to do so. Details such as which residents would have to say this, and what qualifies as "directly" have not yet been provided.
Yes, he really did compare himself to Rosa Parks....
Ammon Bundy Compares Oregon Standoff to Rosa Parks and Everyone Is Livid
On Wednesday, Ammon Bundy, posted a tweet about the ongoing anti-government standoff led by a group of armed ranchers in Oregon, and Bundy's statement is drawing fire from all who read it:
"We are doing the same thing as Rosa Parks did," Bundy wrote. "We are standing up against bad laws which dehumanize us and destroy our freedom."
One of the things that happens is that folks get inside their bubbles and get convinced that there's thousands, if not millions of people out there that agree with them. One of the first things said to the media when this started was "We invite all patriots to come and join us."
Which is, literally, "Come join us out in the middle of absolutely nowhere and let's have an armed standoff with Obama's Government!"
I think they expected more folks to show up by now. 😛
_______________________________________________________________________
There are more media flunkies there than are protesters or law enforcement.
The protesters are making their point getting their message out.Do you think they are like Rosa Parks?
Looks like the Amon Twitter handle turns out to be the work of an imposter orchestrating a brilliant twitter hoax that all the leftists in the media jumped on.
How can you tell? 😛
I figured out that this is just another way to make money for the Bundy's. Check this picture out that the mainstream media won't show you.
http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/libertarian-fairy-tales-of-the-bundy-family
Libertarian Fairy-Tales: The Bundy Militia's Revisionist History in Oregon
For centuries, the federal government has bailed out cattle ranchers in Oregon and other Western states. It requires a lot of magical thinking—and historical erasure—to see “tyranny” in Harney County.
Aaron Bady · 5 hours ago
Though actual historians would quibble with how the militia movement understands American history, the Bundy family has justified what they are doing by evoking a distinctly 18th-century style of American patriotism. Because the land and its resources belong to the people, and because a tyrannical government now conspires to take it from them—which they say is specifically and intentionally an effort to reduce free men to slaves—the free people of America have the right and even the moral obligation to take a stand against that government. “We’re out here because the people have been abused long enough,” as Ammon Bundy put it; “their lands and resources have been taken from them, to the point where it’s putting them literally in poverty.”
Like the original American revolutionaries, the Bundys warn of creeping tyranny. If they fetishize the constitution, it's fair to say they worship the Declaration of Independence, and the Bundys tell the same kind of story about a government’s history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having as their direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny. To them, Barack Obama’s federal government is not simply misguided or abusive; to them and their ideological bedfellows, the government of the United States is intentionally sabotaging the economy to drag free men and women into poverty, making them dependent on government handouts and patronage, and, thus, easy to control. Government is not just the problem; government is the enemy.
This is why the seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is only superficially about the incident that provoked the conflict—the Hammond family and its legal troubles. The Hammonds provide a useful pretext for directly confronting the Federal government, or, as Ammon Bundy puts it: "The Hammonds are just an example or a symptom of a very huge and egregious problem, but it’s happening all across the United States." Bundy continues:
We have the EPA that is taking property away from people, they are restricting whole industries, putting whole states and counties into economic depression. We have a slew other federal agencies that are doing the same thing, and they are doing it by controlling the land and resources, because they know where wealth generates from: wealth generates from the earth, from the land and resources. If they can control them, then they can be the beneficiaries of them, and then the American people have to practically beg them for whatever they give them.
Before seizing the refuge, the Bundy brothers first appealed to the Harney County Sheriff on November 12th, urging him to defy the Federal government as the true representative of the people. Like their father, Cliven Bundy, who defied the Federal government because he regarded it as a "foreign court," the Bundy brothers belong to the "county supremacy movement," who regard the only legitimate policing power as the County Sheriff. In that open letter, they argue that the Hammonds did no more than to "use and care for the land," and as a result have come into conflict with the government, "those that harbor the ideology that it is a moral obligation to restrict man from the use of the land and resources." According to Bundy, "multiple federal employees are using their position in government to remove the Hammonds from the land to set a precedent for the removal of other land users."
This claim makes more sense if you assume that Barack Obama really is a secret socialist, and that the United States government has been infiltrated by subversionary elements seeking to establish totalitarian rule over the American people. And a lot of Americans do believe these things. The Bundys accuse the Bureau of Land Management (along with the EPA and other federal agencies) not of enforcing the law, but of conspiring to "restrict man from the use of the land" as an end in itself. There is therefore no point in trying to "reform" how the BLM manages public lands. If this government’s actual goal is tyranny—and control of the land and its resources is the instrument it uses—then public lands are only a battlefield; seizing them is a strike against tyranny, but only a first step. One has only to take these "patriots" at their word to see that they are not reformists but revolutionaries.
The story the Bundy brothers tell is mostly empty space, like the Western frontier of their imagination.
Though it may lack the rhetorical zip of the Thomas Jefferson original, the open letter that the Bundy family wrote to the Harney County Sheriff in November is—like the Declaration of Independence itself—primarily a list of grievances. There are a few semi-quotable assertions, like the claim that "Government employees (full-time & elected) have changed their culture from one of service to, and respect for the people, to the roll [sic] of being a masters" or the declaration that "It is the duty of the people to defend their God given rights if government fails to do so or turns to devour them." But most of the document an attempts to substantiate the grounds on which the Bundys are aggrieved, by telling a story of government tyranny—a 4,000 word bill of the Violations, Corruptions and Abuses and an accounting of the Facts & Events.
I’m not sure how many people read the open letter when it first appeared at the Bundy Ranch website in November, misspellings and all, or when they reposted it in December. But on Sunday, the Facts & Events section appeared (without citation) at "the Conservative Treehouse," where it has been shared far and wide. The Conservative Treehouse is a far-right website (it ran hit-pieces on Trayvon Martin) and these days serves as a clearinghouse for news on Benghazi, how Donald Trump will make America great again, and talking points from the NRA; from there, the document has been shared many thousands of times on Facebook, and was even re-re-posted back onto the Bundy Ranch website. Despite being essentially authored by the Bundys themselves, it is viewed in some circles as unvarnished truth, the key contextualizing document in the latest Bundy affair, at least for those sympathetic to the militia movement (and especially for those who reject anything published under the shadow of .gov, and who get their facts from Infowars and from Facebook).
This, for example, is how the Bundy family describes the origins of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which they have occupied:
(aa) The Harney Basin (were the Hammond ranch is established) was settled in the 1870s. The valley was settled by multiple ranchers and was known to have run over 300,000 head of cattle. These ranchers developed a state of the art irrigated system to water the meadows, and it soon became a favorite stopping place for migrating birds on their annual trek north.
(ab) In 1908 President Theodor Roosevelt, in a political scheme, create an "Indian reservation" around the Malheur, Mud & Harney Lakes and declared it "as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds". Later this "Indian reservation" (without Indians) became the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
This is a libertarian fairy tale, even before the authors go on to dismiss wildlife conservation as a "political scheme." In the beginning, there was the land. But like all virgin soil, it required entrepreneurial ranchers to settle it before it could produce value, and this was central to the myth: that nothing existed before the arrival of these free men. The "Indian reservation" is mentioned a full paragraph after the Harney Basin "was settled in the 1870s," and safely enclosed in scare-quotes (along with the parenthetical disclaimer “without Indians” to emphasize that the Indians didn’t really precede the settlers). Even the birds didn’t really arrive until after our heroic pioneer ranchers had built "a state-of-the-art irrigation system" to make the lake a hospitable stopover spot.
Despite the Bundy mythology of family farming and homesteading—individual homesteads headed by patriarchal Free Men—cattle ranching in Harney County was first and foremost a corporate concern.
For the Bundys, then, nothing really happened before the 1870s. They do not mention Spanish explorers in 1532, or French Canadian trappers, or the British occupation after the war of 1812, or Oregon statehood in the 1850s. Their story most definitely does not begin thousands of years ago, when the first people settled the region. They have no time for how the U.S. Army resettled the northern Paiute in the Malheur Indian reservation in 1872—emptying Harney County for settlement by white people—nor how those same white settlers demanded (and got) the reservation dis-established in 1879 so they could have that land, too.
But history didn’t begin in the 1870s. A lot had to happen before rancher-settlers could run hundreds of thousands of cattle in Harney County, and so a lot has to be forgotten by ideologues like the Bundy family. In part, this is because most of the pre-1870 erasures was done by the federal government. Obviously, the U.S. military first had to ethnically cleanse the land, getting rid of the various native peoples that had lived in these stretches for thousands of years. But even after the land had become "free" to white settlers, prospective ranchers still needed markets for their cattle, especially once their primary market for meat, the U.S. Army, had moved on to other territories. It was the federal government that stepped in and bailed them out, taking on debt by an act of Congress to finance and build a railroad system. Without the Central Pacific Railway, those thousands of cattle could never have been sold.
Despite the Bundy mythology of family farming and homesteading—individual homesteads headed by patriarchal Free Men—cattle ranching in Harney County was first and foremost a corporate concern. For one thing, raising cattle is and has always been a capital-intensive industry, so Harney County ranchers had to be, and were, financed by businessmen in California, which is where most of the ranchers originally came from. In the 1860s and ‘70s, the prospects for cattle ranching in California had become dim: A few major droughts and a piece of fencing legislation in 1874 (which favored planted agriculture over stock-raising by placing the financial burden for fencing on cattle ranchers instead of on grain farmers) effectively closed the California range, sending herds east into the northern Great Basin.
When Peter French first came to Harney County in 1872, for example, he represented Hugh J. Glenn, a businessman in Sacramento, acquiring land and cattle for what he would eventually incorporate (in California) as the French-Glenn Livestock Company. French would marry into Hugh J. Glenn’s family, but only after their business partnership had been consummated, becoming one of the two major corporations that owned the vast majority of the ranchland in the county. Peter French acquired his land by any means necessary, but all of it had originally been acquired by and then from the federal government. Sometimes French bought it from discouraged family settlers, who were looking to move on; sometimes he forced them to move on, so they would sell their land to him. Sometimes he quietly fenced off and seized what would have otherwise been public rangeland; according to a General Land Office report of 1886-87, around 30,000 acres of commons had somehow found itself enclosed by French-Glenn fences. Another means of sidestepping the law was for his own employees to file homestead claims and then immediately sell the land to their employer (according to historian Margaret Lo Piccolo Sullivan, French-Glenn acquired around 27,000 acres between 1882 and 1889, of which around 16,000 were "purchased" from employees listed on the company ledger).
There were many schemes. It was possible to buy land that had been surveyed as "swamp" from the government at very low prices, for example, if you promised to drain and use it. So sometimes French and others would flood the land first, rendering it swampland so as to lower the price. Sometimes they didn’t even bother. In one of the most notorious bits of fiscal legerdemain, French purchased 50,000 acres of swamp land in 1877 from a previous owner who had certified it as swamp, before purchasing it, by technically crossing it in a boat—a boat drawn by mules. The regulatory agencies eventually caught up with these schemes, but by the time they did, most of the land had already been distributed among a very small number of hands.
After the 1870s, the story of Harney County ranching became a story of class warfare, as cattle barons such as French sought to expand and monopolize the range by destroying or incorporating smaller competitors. The underlying economics—and corrupt local governance—tended to favor the syndicate: Only well-capitalized firms, with many employees, had the resources to drive their cattle to the nearest railhead, hundreds of miles away, so small-scale ranchers often had no choice but to sell their cattle to the big operations (at whatever price the large operations chose to buy). Large firms could drive small ranches out of business, simply by refusing to buy from them. Of course, sometimes the big fish eating the little fish paid their own price: Hugh J. Glenn would be killed by a disgruntled employee, and Peter French, in turn, would be shot and killed in 1897 by a small-holder whose farm he had encircled as part of a long-running border dispute. But that was the old West.
The era of the great cattle barons had already passed, long before the Hammonds moved to Oregon and bought their ranch in the Diamond Valley, what had once been a part of French’s 140,000-acre empire. When the frontier closed at the dawn of the 20th century, sheep farms, drought, and desertification put the big cattle ranches into debt: The French-Glenn Livestock Company would be sold to Henry L. Corbett in 1907 and become part of the Blitzen Valley Land Company, which would in turn be reorganized as the Eastern Oregon Livestock Company, in 1916. But in 1935, the company would be underwater again, this time for good; its shareholders would look to the U.S. Government to buy them out.
There are many reasons why the U.S. Government owns so much land in Harney County. Some of the land is of no value to anyone; the Army took all of it from the northern Paiute, but never found buyers for some of it. Sometimes it was always more profitable for individual ranchers just to use government land without buying it. And sometimes the land fell back into the Federal government’s hands because the ranchers no longer wanted it. For all the infrastructure it built to make cattle ranching profitable (and the massive fraudulent handouts to well-connected and well-capitalized cattle corporations), the federal government enabled the great cattle empires of the 1870s only to watch them go belly up. But they were, of course, too big to fail: in a story as old as finance capitalism, the federal government bailed them out and bought back the land.
Western militia-types like to fantasize that they are oppressed by a "foreign" government. They like to play dress-up, to pretend that they are entrepreneurial family farmers who built it all themselves. But you can tell the story of Harney County as a morality tale about the evils of big government only if you leave most of it out. And so they do. The story the Bundy brothers tell is mostly empty space, like the Western frontier of their imagination. And perhaps this is fitting. After all, what is American history if not a history of unspoken violence, told by erasure?
This is an opinon piece by a local guy and I thought it was pretty good read and sensible.
Norm Pattis: Playing at revolutionary rhetoric can have fatal consequences
Norm Pattis Arnold Gold/Register
The trouble with appeals to heaven is the answer might disappoint. For the folks who’ve commandeered the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, that could spell disaster.
My pulse quickens and a certain anarchist joy dawns when I hear of a group of citizens reclaiming their sovereignty. But I smile with the uneasy conscience of a limousine anarchist. Truth be told, I depend on the good will of others to enjoy the life I lead. So do you.
Armed men seized the largely vacant compound in rural Oregon to show solidarity with a rancher and his son, Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had been sentenced to prison for arson. The two ranchers burned land to prevent the growth of invasive plants and to combat wildfires. It turns out their fires spread to federal land.
The protesters at Malheur regard the Hammonds as heroes who were reasserting their natural right to control their land. In this narrative, the federal government, which owns 640 million acres of land, is the harsh and unreasonable overlord. The Hammonds struck back, and the Malheur occupiers have now taken their stand, as well.
As it turns out, the great Satan, Uncle Sam, has shown uncommon sense in the Malheur standoff. No federal troops appear to ring the facility; no federal agent has, at least publicly, served a notice to quit the premises. It appears as if the feds intend to regard this play at rebellion as little more than a sleepover — sooner or later the protesters will just get tired and go home.
The sight of armed men taking federal property quickly yielded claims that the men were terrorists. Otherwise sensible people of color were quick to contend that this was an example of “white privilege” and that, had the armed men been black, they would have been dead by now.
That’s just silliness and racial preening: The effort to strain every event through a racial colander yields only unpalatable mush.
The protesters aren’t terrorists. They’ve not strapped on suicide vests and waltzed into a shopping mall, nor have they turned their guns on unsuspecting people. What they’ve done is taken aim at the federal government and, thus far, they’ve not fired a shot.
Federal land-management policies are highly controversial in the far West, where the government owns as much as one-third of all the land in some states. A federal regulation to protect an endangered species has the potential to infuriate a community, especially when the government shows more solicitude for a reptile than it does for the people it governs.
(If you want a quick introduction to these tensions in fictional form, read C.J. Box’s “Savage Run,” the first in a series of thrillers that captures the beauty of the West and the antagonism between government and those governed.)
Things will get interesting if the standoff doesn’t end soon with a quiet retreat. The feds will eventually move in: expect a midnight raid, the better to avoid film footage and a replay of the carnage at the Branch Davidian compound of David Koresh in Waco, Texas.
And who do you think will win this struggle?
I am reminded all at once of John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government,” written in 1689. Locke is one of the great social contract theorists; I fell in love with his ideas in college and reread his treatise from time to time.
Armed resistance and shows of armed resistance to duly constituted government are risky. John Locke knew this. But he knew that sometimes armed resistance was all that the people had to protect their rights and liberties from tyranny. Hence, the appeal to heaven.
When the sovereign doesn’t listen, the people have the right to resist, with force, if necessary. The results of this conflict are for the heavens — God, in Locke’s view — to decide. Rebellion is risky.
Locke wrote several decades after the conclusion of the English civil wars in the 1640s. They were bloody affairs, resulting in the beheading of King Charles I in 1649. England was torn apart by parties and factions claiming to know what God wanted.
In the end, the monarchy was restored, and death warrants signed for the parliamentarians who authorized Charles’ beheading. Indeed, three of the principal streets in New Haven are named after men who authorized the execution. They took flight to the Colonies and hid in New Haven Colony from the wrath of Charles’ son, Charles II — Edward Whalley, William Goffe and John Dixwell.
Public rhetoric about government and the rights of the people was incendiary in 17th-century England. Such rhetoric is becoming explosive in our time, too.
But playing at revolutionary rhetoric can have fatal consequences. The armed men in Oregon are hard to take seriously. Theirs is less an appeal to heaven than preening for prime time.
Government is a thing of mystery, much like the starry heavens above and moral law within. Just how we come to cloak perfect strangers with the right to tell us what to do is the grand fascination of political philosophers. In the United States, we say we are governed by the consent of the governed. Locke’s social contract theory lingers in the background of our political rhetoric.
So, too, does the possibility for open and armed insurrection. Empires come and go, after all. The wheel of history turns and breaks every heart in the end.
These are angry days in the United States. Perhaps sparks will ignite and create a fire. Maybe the mass shootings are the canaries in the mineshaft — signals that the air we breathe no longer sustains. Perhaps.
But I suspect we’re all still a little too comfortable with the lives we lead to cast our future to chance.
I’ve little real use for those play-acting at revolt. The Oregonians are just an armed version of the costumed tea partiers. They are not serious about their appeal to heaven. Neither are the talking heads on the radio and television.
This drama will end soon enough. Then comes the federal prosecutions and the prison jumpsuits. This isn’t the fire next time; it’s not even smoke.
Norm Pattis, a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer with an office in New Haven, blogs at www.pattisblog.com. His new book, “In the Trenches,” is available on Amazon.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/06/us/native-tribe-blasts-oregon-takeover/index.html
Native tribe blasts Oregon takeover
Burns, Oregon (CNN)The leaders of the Burns Paiute tribe have a message for the men and women who have taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside Burns, Oregon: "Go home. We don't want you here."
The message came from several tribe members whose ancestors fought and died over portions of that land long before the ranchers and farmers had it, long before the federal government even existed.
The tribe is still fighting over land use but now works with the federal government's Bureau of Land Management to save its archaeological sites.
"We have good relations with the refuge. They protect our cultural rights there," said tribal council Chairwoman Charlotte Rodrique.
The Bureau of Land Management is the same agency that has riled up Nevada rancher Ammon Bundy and the armed protesters who joined him from out of state. The men took over the wildlife refuge headquarters, saying they would stay until the land was returned to who they consider its owners, the 100 or so ranchers and farmers who worked the land as far back as 1900.
"We are exercising our constitutional rights. We won't leave until these lands have been turned over to the their rightful owners," Bundy said. "More than 100 ranchers and farmers used to work this land, which was taken illegally by the federal government."
The Paiute tribe decided it was time to speak about what's happening at the refuge. They did so at length and with plenty of emotion.
"They just need to get the hell out of here," tribal council member Jarvis Kennedy told a crowd of reporters and local residents who showed up to listen to what the tribe had to say on the matter.
Later he explained why he felt so angry about the takeover.
"To me they are just a bunch of bullies and little criminals coming in here and trying to push us around over here and occupy our aboriginal territories out there where our ancestors are buried," Kennedy said.
He continued to tell the history of his tribe's fight over land. Members of the tribe are descendants of the Wadatika band of northern Paiutes. Their history in the area dates back 9,000 years ago, the tribe says. The ancestors of the Burns Paiutes lived in caves near the shores of lakes in the Northern Great Basin. When the lakes began drying up the tribe had to migrate.
The tribe said it has never ceded its right to the land but received federal recognition in 1868 and signed a treaty with the federal government that requires it to protect the safety of the natives and promised to prosecute any crime or injury perpetrated by any white man upon them.
Fast forward to 1879 after the treaty was signed. The Paiutes say their people were "loaded into wagons and ordered to walk under heavy guard" in knee-deep snow and forced off their land on foot.
"They literally walked our people, children and women off our lands. They had no problem killing us," Kennedy said.
Inside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, Kennedy said there are important official papers that document his tribe's history and his ancestors' existence on the land. That headquarters has been taken over by men from out of state.
Armed group's leader in federal building: 'We will be here as long as it takes'
"It gets tiring. It's the same battles that my ancestors had. And now it's just a bunch of different cavalry wearing a bunch of different coats," Kennedy said.
He stood with several members of the tribe, whose numbers in the Burns area have dwindled to about 200. They lead hard lives, many working odd jobs to try to make ends meet. Kennedy said he and many others rely heavily on federal government grants to survive.
"It's tough out here. Not a lot of jobs. If any company wants to relocate we'd welcome it," Kennedy said.
Bundy showed up with several others before Christmas to protest a legal case against local father and son Dwight and Steven Hammond.
A federal judge ordered the two men back to prison after a government appeal of their sentences for arson on federal lands. The government said the two set fires to cover up their poaching of deer.
Many of the townspeople said they are upset about what has happened to the Hammonds, seeing them returned to prison after serving the initial sentence, but there are mixed emotions about Bundy and the other protesters, who call themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom.
A few ranchers have supported the group, bringing protesters warm soup and supper.
But in a community meeting called by the Harney County sheriff attended by hundreds of residents from the small town, the vast majority raised their hands when asked if they wanted the group to leave and the situation to end peacefully.
"What is going on down at the refuge is unfortunate. What led up to that is unfortunate, too. There are people here that tried to do a peaceful rally and that got highjacked." Harney County Sheriff David Ward told the crowd. "I am here today to ask those folks to go home and let us get back to our lives here in Harney County."
Louis Smith, who has lived in Burns for 56 years, said of the protesters, "They woke everybody up, we appreciate that. I don't agree with all they are doing, but I don't agree with the government's doing either."
After five days occupying the headquarters in the refuge that they broke into, including taking the tractors and using them as barricades at the entrance, the group has stayed put.
The tribal leaders said they agree with how the federal, local and state law enforcement authorities are dealing with the protesters. That has basically been waiting them out and not physically challenging them. The tribe members are quick to point out that they think things would be much different if it were them trying to take back the land the same way.
"We'd be already shot up, blown up or in jail. Just being honest; they are used to killing us," Kennedy said. "They are white men. That is the difference. That is just how I see it."
wow, amazing well-informed thread. Wish I had time to read all of this right now, this is a graduate course in Western land-use conflicts, thx!
Looks like one of those big posts boils down to the US actually moving in and protecting the land from monopoly by cattle barons. Malheur started on unclaimed land back in early 1900s and certainly wasn't a bullying land grab from local ranchers. That's total bs.
What these guys who have taken over the building out there need to see is a bunch of folks who want their public lands not to be threatened by guntoting mouthbreathers. Malheur is mostly swamp and it is an absolutely critical wildlife hub for the entire Northwest.
Even if it was just given to cattle ranchers, it would be a cowsh*t sludge pond in a very short time, infested by horsehair worms and reeking of offal, and the buffer lands around it would look like the Gobi Desert.
Most ranchers out in Harney take land management very seriously and do a pretty good job keeping private ranchlands in good shape, I find it hard to believe that they support this crap.
W.A.C.O.
We Ain't Comin Out
A story from the local Oregonian and this really shows what a theater of the absurd this really is.
A story from the local Oregonian and this really shows what a theater of the absurd this really is.
LOL, A well regulated Militia.
It's getting better and better! These "radicals" are a laughing stock.
heartbroken militiaman announced that one of his buddies had walked off the Oregon nature preserve they had overtaken and had holed up in a local motel to drink away donation money.
Joe Oshaugnessy, an Arizona militiaman, has been actively seeking volunteers through social media to join the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
But his friends tearfully announced that Oshaugnessy, who is known as “Capt. O,” had left the refuge Wednesday and was instead staying at a motel nearby — as some others associated with the militants have apparently been doing, according to sources.
Some of the militants have reportedly been spotted eating at area restaurants during the standoff, as well.
The militants have been allowed to come and go freely from the nature preserve in the absence of a law enforcement presence, but at least one of them, Brian “Booda” Cavalier, failed to return after a newspaper report revealed he had lied about serving in the U.S. Marines.
Oshaugnessy had apparently argued with some of the participants about the presence of women and children at the wildlife refuge, where militants apparently hoped to draw federal agents into a gun battle.
Jon Ritzheimer, the Arizona militiaman known for organizing anti-Muslim rallies and fundraising through his “Rogue Infidel” site, went to see Oshaugnessy at the motel and found him drinking there, according to Maureen Peltier, a disabled National Guard woman who claims to be the group’s official spokeswoman.
Peltier said Ritzheimer had confirmed that Oshaugnessy had kept the money he had raised through social media for himself and had spent at least some of it on a drinking binge.
Another militant, Cai Irvin, tearfully announced Oshaungnessy’s departure in a Facebook video.
“Ritzheimer did call me — he’s f*cking pissed, he’s mad, he’s upset,” Irvin said. “He told me to tell all of you that Joe Oshaugnessy is a deserter and a coward.”
Irvin said the militants felt betrayed by Oshaugnessy, who had taken part like many of them in the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch — where various factions within the right-wing “patriot” movement also squabbled.
“It’s like finding out there is no such thing as Santa,” Irvin said. “Come on, man.”
Irvin later removed the Facebook video from his public profile page.
Oshaungnessy, meanwhile, wrote on Facebook that a “smear campaign” had been launched against him.
“Because I have been vocal about not supporting the actions taken by the individuals inside the compound apparently they have desired to launch a smear Campaign against me,” he wrote on his profile page. “Even though I am one of the only Patriots on the outside doing everything I can to try and prevent this from turning into another Wako [sic] And making sure to protect the safety of all involved. To what I say my reputation is sterling.”
doing everything I can to try and prevent this from turning into another Wako [sic]
hahaha! I love this. "Wako". Oshaugnessy stayed at the Silver Spur, 45$. Should have stayed at the Sundowner. Nice place, I was there last week. Not bad, only 38 bucks. Small room but the satellite tv worked, and clean and well-maintained, no phones in room though, and no cell service out there. Still, he could have saved 7 dollars for the cause.
These guys can't really hurt anything out there for several months, it is cold as hell and frozen waste. I hope the Feds continue to let these jokers just hang themselves, this is beautiful. Just get their names and numbers, and prosecute after they go home.
Oregon protesters harassing police, sheriff says
By Joshua Berlinger and Sara Weisfeldt, CNN
Updated 1:33 AM ET, Tue January 12, 2016
Burns, Oregon (CNN)Since those occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge came to town, there has been an increase in the number of "vandalism, harassment and intimidation reports," Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said.
"There are continual reports of law enforcement officers and community members being followed home; of people sitting in cars outside their homes, observing their movements and those of their families; and of people following them and their families as they move around the community," Ward said on Monday.
"While not direct physical threats, these activities are clearly designed to try to intimidate," he said.
Some of the armed protesters have been able to leave and return from the refuge center during the occupation.
"Let me be clear: The law enforcement agencies -- those that are local as well as the sheriff's deputies from around the state, the Oregon State Police troopers and the FBI agents -- will not be intimidated from doing their jobs.
"Everyone on the law enforcement side is working together to bring a peaceful resolution to this situation, and the behavior of these folks from outside of our community only serves to escalate the situation unnecessarily."
Ammon Bundy, the son of anti-government Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, and others have been hunkered down in the wildlife refuge since early January. The protest started out as a call against the conviction of Dwight Hammond and his son Steven -- two ranchers who were found guilty in 2012 of committing arson on federal lands in Oregon -- but soon morphed into a bigger movement, rallying against the role of the federal government when it comes to land rights.
Ward says that both law enforcement and employees for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which runs the refuge, have been harassed recently.
He says Fish and Wildlife workers have seen vehicles driving slowly or idling in front of their homes.
"Self-identified militia members" will approach them in public, according to Ward, trying engage in a debate about the federal government.
"The people on the refuge -- and those who they have called to our community -- obviously have no consideration for the wishes or needs of the people of Harney County," he said. "If they did, they, too, would work to bring this situation to a peaceful close."
Protesters arriving on both sides
Ward said after a recently issued "call to action," more armed protesters and "outside militia members" have begun to show up.
But some people are coming with a different message for those at the wildlife refuge, according to CNN affiliate KTVZ.
They're livid, befuddled and want the armed protesters to stop doing what they're doing.
"These are my public lands, these are your public lands, and what I see is a lunatic fringe of radical extremists who have taken my land over," Garrett VeneKlasen, a protester with the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, said.
After Ammon Bundy and his group finished a news conference, VeneKlasen took to the same stage to protest the occupation.
"I came here from New Mexico to speak on behalf of sportsmen, to speak on behalf of people that love land and wildlife, to come to tell these people to get the hell off of our land," he said. "Let's not candy coat this thing -- they are terrorists. They are domestic terrorists."
Another protester, who was holding a sign that said "Get the flock outta my wildlife refuge," told KTVZ that "I never thought I'd have to say this, but I'm here to oppose the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge."
At a community meeting of a couple hundred people in Burns, Franki Gould told CNN that she wants the protesters gone.
"We were a really close town and now we're very divided," she said.
Ward also spoke at that meeting, stressing unity among those from the community
"We can't get things to normal until we unite as a community and ask these folks to go home so we can start working together," he said to raucous applause at a community meeting of a couple hundred people.
"The fact is there is there is an hourglass, and it's running. And time is going to run out."
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/12/us/oregon-armed-protesters/index.html
It gets even better. Apparently people are mailing the protestors sex toys and phallic shaped candy. 😉
http://deadstate.org/oregon-militia-leader-is-really-sad-please-stop-sending-us-your-hate-mail/
I wonder if Trump will propose banning old white men from entering the United States.
He tried to woo a group at Liberty University offering a Bible verse, promoting that he is a Christian, a protestant Christian. If he really does read his Bible and promotes Christianity it will be really interesting if he becomes President when those who are in a Holy War start educating him about their beliefs.
As to the old white men, I can only imagine how he will get the redneck vote, but I know he will. The thing with Donald is he does not lie, he just amplifies the parts of his being to show the audiences he is like they are depending who he is addressing.
He also doesn't get political because he is not a politician, he is a successful businessman but underneath that he is a just a person who has made it. People like that. He tells you what he thinks, and tells you what he will do. I can't imagine the cabinet meetings but everyone who has seen him in the boardroom knows they better have an answer or after he asks them to explain what happened, he has no problem telling they they are fired. I bet Congress would not eff with him, he might get a lot done.
http://katu.com/news/local/leader-of-oregon-occupation-ammon-bundy-three-others-arrested
One dead, Bundys arrested after confrontation with FBI on highway
BY KATU.COM STAFF TUESDAY, JANUARY 26TH 2016
HARNEY COUNTY, Ore. — One person is dead and several others, including Oregon occupation leader Ammon Bundy, were detained following a confrontation with the FBI and state police Tuesday night.
It all began with a traffic stop while Bundy and some of his followers were en route to a community meeting in John Day, about 70 miles away.
Shots were fired after FBI agents, Oregon State troopers and other law enforcement agencies made the stop.
Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox and Ryan W. Payne were arrested during the stop.
They're all facing federal felony charges of conspiracy to impede officers of the US from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.
One person, who was the subject of a federal probable cause arrest died. It's unclear who fired first.
The arrests come on the heels of the 25th day of the refuge occupation.
Bundy and about three dozen of other individuals occupied the wildlife refuge earlier this month after two local ranchers, the Hammonds, were sent to prison for setting fires on federal land.
The Hammonds served no more than a year until an appeals court judge ruled that the terms fell short of minimum sentences requiring them to serve about four more years.
Ammon Bundy said he prayed about the matter and "clearly understood that the Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds."
Bundy told KATU News last weekend his group had no intention of using their weapons, "but we have them, and we're willing to stand with them in our own defense as we exercise our rights, and as we restore our rights back to our brothers and sisters."
WATCH: The showdown at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
KATU News spoke with Harney County Judge Steven Grasty last weekend, who expressed his worry regarding the situation.
"Somebody will do something stupid," Grasty said. "If it goes south, it'll go south because Mr. Bundy or his friends started something."
Gov. Kate Brown had repeatedly asked for assistance from federal authorities regarding the occupation.
Several men were arrested for various traffic infractions during the occupation, but none of them were directly related to the refuge occupation.
In March 2014, Cliven Bundy was at the center of an armed standoff with federal officials over grazing rights on government land. Federal officials backed away from seizing the Nevada rancher's cattle, but the dispute remains unresolved, and the Bureau of Land Management says the family has not made payments toward a $1.1 million grazing fee and penalty bill.
man under blue tarp dead, LaVoy Finicum
Hate to see anyone get killed over this, but Finicum had publicly said he didn't want to die but would not go to jail under any circumstances. Sounds like he made his choice and paid the price. As for the rest, prison sounds like a good place for them to be for a while, although I suspect their followers will look at them as martyrs of some kind. This whole thing has been so ridiculous on so many levels.
Hate to see anyone get killed over this, but Finicum had publicly said he didn't want to die but would not go to jail under any circumstances. Sounds like he made his choice and paid the price. As for the rest, prison sounds like a good place for them to be for a while, although I suspect their followers will look at them as martyrs of some kind. This whole thing has been so ridiculous on so many levels.
Team Bundy now claiming Finicum was assassinated while surrendering, hands in the air. A play right out of the Ferguson playbook. I have to imagine, given all the obvious risks, the cops were smart enough to be wearing body cams during the apprehension. Give it time I think we'll get to see for ourselves what actually happened. Last thing this country needs right now is a bunch of angry militant white people rising up against a false narrative.
That is, of course, unless you're Donald Trump.
[Edited on 1/27/2016 by PerryBoynton]
I saw that too. I hope you are right. Given his statements about not going to jail and some of the outlandish things this group as said and done, I'll be very surprised if there is much truth to the claims being made by Team Bundy.
Serious miscalculation by this old codger. Too bad they couldn't set their blasters on stun.
One of the issues that have prompted the FBI’s Public Corruption investigation of the Clinton Foundation was the revelation that as Sec. of State, Hillary Clinton’s State Department fast-tracked approval of uranium transfers to Russian interests that was highly profitable for the Clintons.
Enter The Oregon "Standoff" Sheriff.
So far, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has not crafted a lie to blame The Republicans.
Oregon Sherriff tied directly to Clinton Foundation trafficking of Uranium to Russians
‘Oregon Sheriff Dave Ward in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution’
Posted on January 24, 2016 by Shepard Ambellas
Bubba system backed Sheriff Dave Ward violates Constitution in effort to aid Russian Uranium mining operation on area ranch-lands
Shepard Ambellas | Intellihub
BURNS, Ore. (INTELLIHUB) — Ammon Bundy and his supporters left the Malheur Wildlife Refuge Friday, along with a group of reporters, to attend a scheduled meeting with the FBI at the Burns Airport. However, the FBI lied to Bundy and failed to uphold their promise from the previous day, sparking the group to go confront Sheriff Dave Ward at the police H.Q. in town.
The entire incident, which followed a broken promise, took place on a cold, windy, ice-covered, street and was captured on video.
Ammon and members of his team arrived in true patriot fashion. Ammon was sporting a real nice suede cowboy hat that matched the plaid, swede shoulder, shirt he was wearing. A pocket constitution was carefully tucked away in his left upper breast pocket.
Ammon’s point of the visit was to ascertain whether or not the FBI was operating in the county under permission from the Sheriff.
“I hope to find out where the Sheriff’s position is on this,” Ammon told a reporter, just before a random passerby said aloud, “his is my town–you people get the hell out of here.”
As Ammon and his group approached, heavily armed law enforcement took a defensive stance.
Seconds later an undersheriff of Ward’s, Lieutenant Deputy Brian Needham, along with Malheur County Sheriff Brian E. Wolfe, and Wheeler County Sheriff Chris Humphreys, approached Bundy and his people in representation of the weak and unqualified Sheriff Dave Ward, who could care less about anything other than getting the Russian-owned mining company Uranium One up and running in his county on lands promised to the company by the Clinton’s through the bubba system.
Ammon explained to the undersheriff how he had asked the FBI “four times if the Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Ward, has given them authority to be there […] written authority […] to be enforcing law here in the county.”
“They [the FBI] are taking care of the refuge situation. It’s federal property,” the rookie Needham told Bundy.
“It’s not federal property. The Constitution is pretty clear,” one of the group members explained to Needham.
“That is what the argument is,” Bundy told Needham.
“And even if it [the refuge] is federal property, which it’s not–let’s say I was standing on the grounds of the Post Office which would be federal property–to enforce law on that property they [the FBI] are to come to the County Sheriff and the County Sheriff is to enforce that law–that way the people are protected,” Bundy explained.
“So has the FBI been given permission from the Sheriff’s Department to enforce law in the county,” Bundy asked Needham.
That’s when the rookie slipped up and answered, “At the refuge, yes.”
Needham went on to explain how the FBI set up in a “BLM building.”
“The FBI is here working in conjunction with the Sheriff’s Office,” Sheriff Ward gave them permission to be here, Needham said.
“Ok, that’s all I need to know,” Ammon said as he turned his back and walked away.
“They are in direct violation of the Constitution, the Sheriff is, if he’s given them permission to be there then they are in direct violation of the Constitution. And that’s what we need to know,” Ammon told the press.
Clinton Foundation took massive payoffs, promised Hammond Ranch and other publicly owned lands to Russians along with one-fifth of our uranium ore
Hate to see anyone get killed over this, but Finicum had publicly said he didn't want to die but would not go to jail under any circumstances. Sounds like he made his choice and paid the price. As for the rest, prison sounds like a good place for them to be for a while, although I suspect their followers will look at them as martyrs of some kind. This whole thing has been so ridiculous on so many levels.
Prison wives would be a dose of reality for all of them.
You can ignore the backstory detailing the history and the tactics used by the feds or the waste of resources to revisit and upgrade their criminal sentences which sounds right out of a Soviet gulag or banana repbublic. Right now this is nothing more than a peaceful protest in an unoccupied gov building to highlight land management freedoms eroding away in a part of the country where the decision makers (federal bureaucrats) have no concept about the reality on the ground or how their decisions impact the residents.
The good people who live in the community want them gone.
It makes me sick that these people, and others like them, have hijacked the word Patriot. These people are the exact opposite of patriots, and for all the talk of the constitution, they have absolutely no idea what is in it. I think they stopped reading the constitution at the second Amendment, because it's clear that the Federal government has the right to own land and administer it the way it wants. These people who think they can use guns to get free government handouts make me sick.