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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWho Egged On the Bundy Brothers?
Ammon Bundy and his rogue crew arent the only ones trying to privatize public land.
By William deBuys
Today 10:49 am
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and wont soon go away. Last winters armed takeover and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadnt been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called terrorists and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of Western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownershipor at least that of their leaders, since they werent exactly a band of intellectualswas only loosely linked to reality.
At least some of them took inspiration from the notion that Jesus Christ wrote the Constitution (which would be news to the Deists, like James Madison, who were its actual authors) and that it prohibits federal ownership of any land excepting administrative sites within the United Statesa contention that more than two centuries of American jurisprudence has emphatically repudiated.
The troubling thing is that similar delusions infect pockets of unrest throughout the West, lending a kind of twisted legitimacy to efforts at both the state and national level to transfer Western public lands to states and counties. To be sure, not all the proponents of this liquidation of Americas national patrimony subscribe to wing-nut doctrines; sometimes they just use them.
http://www.thenation.com/article/who-egged-on-the-bundy-brothers/
KT2000
(20,604 posts)the want all that land to exploit. They are having some success in electing people who support them.
haikugal
(6,476 posts)Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Right Wing Tea Party activist in Utah. The Rethug Party in Utah was taken over by this extremist bunch,and their Money Baggers were the Koch Brothers as well as Exon-Mobile via Land Exchange Groups and so called Land Councils. The subset to watch is a group by the name American Independence Party. Just another front group for Militias and SovCit groups,to which the Bundy family was and is active in and with. When you have State Legislative as well as County Commissioners active in or promoting these groups,in that lies a serious Political problem. Most of these actors are related through marriage and kinship as well as religion. And yes,they do use intimidation and verbal threats to further their agendas.
Quiet_Dem_Mom
(599 posts)Miss "It's OK to Aim Guns at LEOs if They Aim First"
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/05/02/3774423/michele-fiore-nevada-aim-gun-at-cops/
Fortunately for Nevada, she chose not to run for re-election for her assembly seat and opted to run for the House seat. Last I heard she was a distant third in that race, at best.