Cliven Bundy And His Cows
What you eat is like the news you get, it’s what you’re fed.
If you’re getting your info from mainstream media, you"re being fed swill.
"It's pretty tough to follow mainstream media without subjecting yourself to industrial-strength brainwashing."
You can get a quick rundown, without the bull, from Bryan Hyde. Listen as he talks more about the matter and the September, 2023 Op-Ed New York Times article by Christopher Ketcham
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"Nine years ago (Sep. 27, 2033), a 68-year-old rancher named Cliven Bundy issued a call to arms from his spread in southern Nevada near the small desert town of Bunkerville. Mr. Bundy rallied supporters to join him in defending his cattle from the “overreach” of federal officials. He had been grazing his cows illegally on federal property since 1993, in an area called Gold Butte, now a national monument. Amazingly, he still is. What unfolded nine years ago was an early rehearsal in right-wing insurrection that arguably culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. Hundreds of supporters, many of them heavily armed, gathered in Mr. Bundy’s defense in early April 2014 and turned their pistols and rifles on agents from the federal Bureau of Land Management, which had attempted to round up the hundreds of trespassing cows. Mr. Bundy’s rationale was simple: He did not recognize the federal government’s claim to the land. In an embarrassment that was nationally televised and widely celebrated in the circles of right-wing extremists, the B.L.M. officers found themselves outnumbered.
The government backed down, the cows were let go and the Bundys and their supporters shouted victory. Later, a federal judge dismissed more than a dozen felony charges against Mr. Bundy, two of his sons and a supporter, after prosecutors erred in not turning over important evidence that might have helped the defendants. The charges included conspiracy to commit an offense against the nation and assault on a federal officer.
Today, with seeming impunity, Mr. Bundy continues running his cattle illegally on federal land that has been permanently closed to livestock grazing since the mid-1990s to protect the endangered desert tortoise and other rare species. The cows are denuding the landscape, trampling the soil, killing native plants and fouling streams that nourish the desert wildlife. “If you want to see them, I could take you there tomorrow,” Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said this week of the trespassing cattle. This month, Western Watersheds Project, a conservation group, sued the bureau and the U.S. Forest Service, among others, for failing to protect the Mojave Desert tortoise and other species in the Gold Butte area. In a statement, the group cited “the impacts of Cliven Bundy’s 30 years of trespass livestock grazing” and the development of solar farms. “Unsurprisingly, Mojave Desert tortoise populations are in free fall,” the group said.
At the time of the 2014 standoff, Alan O’Neill, who had a similar struggle with Mr. Bundy when he was superintendent of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, expressed concern that the government had done nothing to stop the scofflaw rancher. “He calls himself a patriot, and says he loves America,” Mr. O’Neill told The Times. “And yet he says he won’t follow any federal laws. You just can’t let this go by, or everybody is going to be like, ‘If Bundy can break the law, why can’t I?’” Good question. But you won’t get an answer from the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the land that Mr. Bundy’s cattle continue to graze illegally. The agency won’t discuss why Mr. Bundy has been allowed to run roughshod over rules other ranchers follow or how much he owes in fees and fines to federal taxpayers. (As of 2014, it was an estimated $1.1 million.)
As for Mr. Bundy, he did not respond to a request for an interview. But one of his supporters, Vincent Easley II — who said he administers the Facebook page Cliven Bundy American Patriot — did. He pointed to a recent article in The Las Vegas Sun that said that Mr. Bundy “was quoted in 2018 saying that if B.L.M. ever came to seize his cattle over unpaid grazing fees again, they would encounter ‘the very same thing as last time.’” To which Mr. Easley added in an email to me: “It is my belief that if this happens, not hundreds, but thousands” would “converge on the Bundy ranch to stand as a buffer against such action.”
The standoff at Bunkerville might have been a historical footnote, if not for the fact that it helped galvanize and unite disparate militia groups that would end up empowered more than ever in the far-right fever dream of the Trump years. Two years after the Bunkerville confrontation, one of Mr. Bundy’s sons, Ammon, led an armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which he occupied with fellow protesters for nearly six weeks. The incursion began as a protest of the imprisonment of two local ranchers for intentionally setting fires that spread to federal land, and it grew into a stand against federal control of land in the West. The militias at Bunkerville and Malheur included two groups involved in the January 2021 attack on the Capitol: the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, some of whom wore T-shirts emblazoned with an image similar to a photograph of Eric Parker, who became known as the “Bundy ranch sniper,” lying prone on a highway overpass at Bunkerville aiming his semiautomatic rifle at bureau officers.
Several militia members have been convicted of crimes related to their participation in the Capitol attack. While the Bundys were not in Washington on Jan. 6, the day after the attack, Cliven Bundy signaled his support in a Facebook post from Nevada, writing: “100,000 should have spent the night in the halls, and 100,000 should have protected them.” And a few days after that, Mr. Bundy, in a radio interview, warned the incoming Biden administration to stay away from his cattle. “If we have to walk forward towards guns, which we did at the Bundy ranch, we have to do that,” he said. Richard Spotts, a former bureau employee, has proposed ways to handle the clan and their errant cows. The government could place a lien on Cliven Bundy’s property and seize his cattle when they go to auction. (Astonishingly, the bureau has not done this.) Federal agents could use a bench warrant to arrest Mr. Bundy, quickly and without fanfare, in a Walmart parking lot. “You could be creative about finding ways that he’s not going to be able to alert the militia and have 300 people there with bulletproof vests and assault rifles,” Mr. Spotts told Boise State Public Radio last year. Like his fellow public servant Mr. O’Neill, Mr. Spotts said something has to be done, because it would set a dangerous precedent to let the Bundys walk. “Are we still a country of the rule of law?” he asked. When it comes to Cliven Bundy, the answer at present is no." Christopher Ketcham, author of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption Are Ruining the American West,” writes about the environment for his website, Denatured.
Comparing history to the events of today for an expectation of the future, for our world and mankind as a whole.
Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
“The Battle of Bunkerville” was the Stand-Off in the Spring of 2014 headed by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s BLM (Bureau of Land Management) along the Virgin River in Southern Nevada.
On the other-side, were several hundred Americans Standing in the Gap in a Peaceful Pushback as both a protective buffer for the Bundy family, and to protest the government’s roundup and attempted confiscation of several hundred head of Bundy cattle.
USA vs Bundy et al.United States v. Bundy, Case No. 2:16-cr-00046-GMN-PAL (D. Nev. Dec. 30, 2016)The Bundy Ranch Standoff and Trial Report by Vincent Easley II
Bundy Ranch - We are trading one form of slavery for another.
"Americans are trading one form of slavery for another. All of us are in some measure slaves of the federal government. Through their oppressive tactics of telling the ranchers how many cows they can have on their land, and making that number too low to support a ranch, the BLM has driven every rancher in Clark County off the land, except me. The IRS keeps the people of America in fear, and makes us all work about a third or a half of the year before we have earned enough to pay their taxes. This is nothing but slavery from January through May. The NSA spies on us and collects our private phone calls and emails. And the government dole which many people in America are on, and have been for much of their lives, is dehumanizing and degrading. It takes away incentive to work and self respect. Eventually a person on the dole becomes a ward of the government, because his only source of income is a dole from the government. Once the government has you in that position, you are its slave.
I am trying to keep Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream alive. He was praying for the day when he and his people would be free, and he could say I’m free, free at last, thank God I’m free at last! But all of us here America, no matter our race, are having our freedom eroded and destroyed by the federal government because of its heavy handed tactics. The BLM, the IRS, the NSA–all of the federal agencies are destroying our freedom. I am standing up against their bad and unconstitutional laws, just like Rosa Parks did when she refused to sit in the back of the bus. She started a revolution in America, the civil rights movement, which freed the black people from much of the oppression they were suffering. I’m saying Martin Luther King’s dream was not that Rosa could take her rightful seat in the front of the bus, but his dream was that she could take any seat on the bus and I would be honored to sit beside her. I am doing the same thing Rosa Parks did–I am standing up against bad laws which dehumanize us and destroy our freedom. Just like the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord, we are saying no to an oppressive government which considers us to be slaves rather than free men.
I invite all people in America to join in our peaceful revolution to regain our freedom. That is how America was started, and we need to keep that tradition alive."
Cliven D. Bundy · 25 April 2014·
For the True Story about the Bundy Ranch.
I’d invite you read the book from Mike Stickler, Cliven Bundy American Patriot.
This is the account in the background on the ranch's establishment, and the Fed Led Standoff in April 2014. This narrative comes straight from Cliven to Mike.
Ketcham is an opinion piece writer and authored “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption Are Ruining the American West”.