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Tag: oregon standoff
Kid Gloves For Homegrown Extremists Are Part Of A Strategy

Kid Gloves For Homegrown Extremists Are Part Of A Strategy

Soon after a bunch of white guys with guns holed up at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in protest against the federal government, wags took to social media to deride them.

“Y’all Qaeda,” “YeeHawdists” and “Vanilla ISIS” are some of the clever put-downs circulating on Twitter.

Critics also decried what they perceive as a double standard in the seeming lack of response from law enforcement. If the gun-toting men were black or Muslim, went the typical argument, they would have incurred the full, militarized wrath of law enforcement.

So it might appear, but if you think law enforcement agencies are being deferential out of fear, you couldn’t be more wrong. Be very grateful that federal officials know exactly whom they are dealing with: troublemakers just itching for an excuse to claim that the federal government provoked them first.

As of this writing, things are still calm at the wildlife refuge, nearly 30 miles from the nearest town. But this bunch has itchy trigger fingers and enough conspiracy-addled emotion to take their standoff to the next level of danger.

In this desolate location, these guys are more likely a danger to each other than to the local population — although they have irked nearby residents and the Burns Paiute Tribe, who deem the siege a desecration of sacred land.

Ammon Bundy — the son of the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who had his own standoff with federal agents in 2014 over $1 million in unpaid grazing fees — and the other men occupying the wildlife refuge splintered off from a protest of several hundred people, a gathering that drew Oregonians concerned about longstanding issues with rules for land overseen by U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Bundy is from Arizona. How’d he wind up in Oregon? He smelled an opportunity for the limelight.

Bundy calls his Oregon crew Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, and it includes his brother and an Arizona man, Jon Ritzheimer, who has gained renown of late for staging armed anti-Muslim protests.

The presence of Ritzheimer and other idiosyncratic “patriots” led the Daily Beast to dub the occupation Wingnut Woodstock. These anti-government activists have come out of the woodwork at a time when some Americans have become hyper-focused on Islamic terrorists, Syrian refugees and other perceived threats to the nation.

Indeed, America faces multiple threats, including homegrown extremists. This month, Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization reviled by extremists, issued a report noting that the number of militia groups in the U.S. leapt to 276 from 202 in 2014.

In October, the Justice Department announced a new office to focus entirely on homegrown extremists. In doing so, the department acknowledged that it had taken its eye off the ball domestically, consumed as it has been with threats of overseas terrorists since 9/11.

Law enforcement authorities closer to the street haven’t been as easily distracted. A June survey by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University found that police were highly aware of the homegrown threat. Surveying nearly 400 departments, it found that 74 percent were more concerned about anti-government extremists than the possibility of an attack inspired by or actually the work of al-Qaida or the Islamic State.

A colleague of mine, Kansas City Star reporter Judy L. Thomas, has spent decades chronicling such movements. She has written extensively on Posse Comitatus, Christian identity groups, white nationalists, militias and now the growth of the sovereign citizen movement, loose networks that see the government as dangerously corrupt and out of control.

Part of the problem, Thomas said, is that we don’t have a consistent definition of domestic terrorism. And the term is sometimes abused for political gain. It can be difficult to determine who is a mere conspiracy theorist with an arsenal and who is likely actually to act out his revolutionary fantasies violently.

The homegrown extremist groups often see themselves as soldier-saviors of America, armed and ready to do battle with the evil federal government that is taking away constitutional rights. Thomas’ sources, including past federal agents, say that much was learned after Waco, where more than 75 people died, as well as in other encounters with militia members. Authorities prefer methods to defuse rather than spark confrontation. That will surely save lives, in Oregon and elsewhere. And it will, one hopes, deny extremists another recruiting opportunity.

Ritzheimer said this in a widely viewed video he posted online from Oregon: “I am 100 percent willing to lay my life down to fight against tyranny in this country.” Authorities are taking him at his word — and not giving him his chance for martyrdom.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.) (c) 2016, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: Ammon Bundy (L), and Wes Kjar depart for a news conference from an office at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon January 6, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

No, There Isn’t A Racial Double Standard At Work In Oregon

No, There Isn’t A Racial Double Standard At Work In Oregon

Out here on the edge of the National Forest, in the cattle-ranching, timber-cutting, deer-hunting county where I live, this Ammon Bundy guy looks like the Al Sharpton of cows. His publicity seeking has created a media pseudo-event of a particularly modern kind.

Can anybody doubt that the feds could more efficiently resolve standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by confiscating TV cameras rather than guns?

Actually there’s no real “standoff,” since law enforcement is nowhere in sight. Blocking the roads, cutting the power, and waiting them out looks like the wisest policy, although there appear to be almost as many tribal ideologues on the left hankering for a shootout as anti-government militia types.

Washington Monthly’s normally sensible David Atkins is breathing smoke and fire: “I feel that if Bundy’s little crew wants to occupy a federal building and assert that they’ll use deadly violence against any police who try to extract them,” he wrote “then they should get what they’re asking for just as surely Islamist terrorists would if they did likewise…”

“What’s good for one type of terrorist must also be good for another,” Atkins continued.

Sounds downright Trump-like to me. Elsewhere, racialized insults and cries for vengeance have become common. “Y’all-qaeda,” “yee-hawdists,” “yokel haram,” tweeted New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz. Less witty ridicule is everywhere.

At Salon, Bundy’s cowboy patriots are denounced as a “strident example of unapologetic white privilege in action.”

Salon thinks that “They’d be killed if they were black: The racial double standard at the heart of the new Bundy family standoff.”

“Armed white men seize a federal building. The government stands down carefully. But a 12-year-old with a toy gun?” reads the sub-hed.

Even Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson couldn’t resist making the tempting, but specious comparison between Bundy and Tamir Rice, the Cleveland child killed by cops in a city park. Think harder. Everybody acknowledges the boy’s death was a pointless tragedy. Nobody wanted him to die.

It’s also clearly false that armed white crackpots are always given a pass. Heard of Ruby Ridge? Waco? But hold that thought.

Robinson does acknowledge the single most salient fact: that Bundy’s posse is holed-up deep in the Oregon wilderness, thirty miles from a town of 2800, a threat to nobody but each other. The last thing the US government needs to do is give them the martyrdom a few of the crazier ones crave.

Then too, as a political matter, Bundy appears to have made an almost comical miscalculation. Hardly anybody in remote Harney County appears to support his cause. Even the father-son team of ranchers who reported on schedule to begin serving five year prison terms Bundy’s group is allegedly protesting have renounced his support.

Dwight and Steve Hammond did plead guilty to arson, you know.

In a press conference, county Sheriff David Ward addressed the anti-government vigilantes directly: “To the people at the wildlife refuge: You said you were here to help the citizens of Harney County. That help ended when a peaceful protest became an armed occupation. The Hammonds have turned themselves in. It’s time for you to leave our community, go home to your families and end this peacefully.”

Which is not to say those sentences are either just or equitable. Even among their neighbors, opinions differ. Five years seems like an awfully long time for torching 139 acres of sagebrush and juniper—particularly given Dwight Hammond’s age, 73.

The sentencing judge thought so too, refusing to enforce the mandatory minimum as unconstitutionally severe. After prosecutors objected, the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco imposed the statutory penalty. Indeed, the Hammonds’ legal appeals are not complete, making the timing of Bundy’s insurrection inconvenient at best.

Detailed accounts in local media make the entire affair sound like a high desert version of Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey’s manic epic about a western Oregon logging clan. Some stress the Hammond family’s business success and generous support of local charities.

Trial records, however, also make it appear that as wealthy ranchers are prone to do, the Hammonds had taken to acting dictatorially. No doubt Bureau of Land Management bureaucracy can be maddening, but renting grazing rights on government land doesn’t convey the freedom of action a rancher has on his own property.

For the past 20 years, the Hammonds have taken to confronting hunters killing “their” deer on federal land, and threatening U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents over water and fencing disputes. According to a 2010 grand jury indictment, “Hammond family members have been responsible for multiple fires” for more than 20 years. The indictment also alleged that one fire was set to destroy evidence of deer poaching — animals killed not for meat but because they competed with cattle for forage.

If true, the wonder is that they got away with it so long.

Photo: Ammon Bundy departs after addressing the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon, January 4, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

A White Man Just Can’t Catch A Break

A White Man Just Can’t Catch A Break

He brought his rifle up at the sound of footsteps crunching the Oregon snow. “Who goes there? Stop and be recognized.”

A weary voice answered out of the darkness. “It’s me, Sam. It’s Bud.”

“Give me the password.”

“Come on, Sam. Stop foolin’ around.”

“The password,” Sam insisted.

Bud sighed. “‘Patriots act.’ Are you happy now?”

Sam lowered the weapon as Bud stepped out of the trees into the meager circle of moonlight. “Can’t be too careful,” he said. He cupped his hands and blew into them. It was cold out here. “So where you been?” he asked.

“Down to the front gate.”

Sam grinned. “Bet you it’s a zoo, bunch of satellite trucks and media elites standing around. Who all’s down there? CNN? NBC? CBS? Sure hope Fox sends that Megyn Kelly. That babe can interview me anytime.”

Bud shook his head. “Ain’t much media down there at all.”

“Oh. Cops are keepin’ em back, huh?”

“Hardly any cops, neither.”

Sam had been stamping his feet trying to bring back circulation. Now he paused, looking over at Bud in shock. “No cops?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Do they know we took over a federal facility?”

“Yup.”

“I mean, it’s only a wildlife refuge in the boonies, but it’s still federal property, ain’t it?”

“Yup.”

“So that’s treason or somethin’, right?”

“You’d think.”

“Do they know Cliven Bundy’s sons are out here with us? Do they know we’re supporting local ranchers against federal tyranny?”

“They know.”

“Do they know we’re armed? Do they know we’re ready to shoot it out? Do they know we’re ready to die — and to take some of them with us?”

“Yup, yup and yup.”

“And they’re still ignoring us?”

“Appears that way.”

“Hell,” said Sam. Cold smoke drifted from his mouth. He couldn’t feel his fingers. “Hell,” he said again. “That ain’t fair.”

“How do you mean?” Bud stood hunched over, his hands pinned in his armpits.

“You think if a bunch of damn Muslims had took this place over, the cops and the media would be diddling around like this? You wouldn’t be able to think for the helicopters buzzing overhead. You’d be blinded by the TV lights. They’d send Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Lester Holt. Hell, even if we was just black, they’d at least send Geraldo Rivera. But a bunch of white men? Nothin’.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Bud thoughtfully, “I mean, the media did turn out when ol’ Clive made his stand a couple years ago. He had plenty attention.”

“He did, but did you notice how they treated him? They acted like he was just an old kook like your crazy uncle Bubba. He’s out there with a bunch of armed men refusing to recognize federal authority, but they acted like he was … harmless.”

Bud nodded. “I see your point,” he said.

“I’m tired of bein’ treated like I’m harmless just ’cause I’m white. White men ain’t harmless. Did you hear about that biker gang shootout in Waco last May? Nine people dead, twice that many wounded, almost 180 arrests. That sound harmless to you?”

Bud shook his head. “I must have missed that,” he said.

“See, that’s my point. If 180 Mexican illegals had shot it out, you think you wouldn’t know about it? Hell, it would have been the top news story of the year! The blacks, the Muslims, the Mexicans, they get all the attention they want even when they’re not doin’ nothin’, but guys who look like you and me, we get bupkes. What do we need, bikini girls? For criminy sake, we’re committing armed insurrection against the federal government! Ain’t that enough?”

Sam went back to stamping his feet. He found himself wondering idly about the symptoms of hypothermia. “A white man just can’t catch a break,” he muttered.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)(c) 2016 THE MIAMI HERALD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Ammon Bundy addresses the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon, January 4, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

Cartoon: Up In Oregon

Cartoon: Up In Oregon