No, the Ku Klux Klan Has Never, Ever Been a 'Leftist' Organization

"It's important to get history right."

So quoth Jeffrey Lord, the conservative CNN analyst, on Tuesday during a noteworthy exchange with liberal commentator Van Jones. It's noteworthy because -- in stark contrast to his own admonition -- Lord had tried peddling an up-is-down, reality-inverted version of history in that segment (and on CNN the day before), namely, his claim (while attempting to defend Donald Trump for his refusal to disavow the endorsement of far-right extremists) that the Ku Klux Klan was "a leftist terrorism organization."

This is not just flat-out false, it is an outrageous inversion of historical reality: the Klan was not just a self-described "conservative," right-wing organization, it probably was one of the earliest iterations of the most extreme known form of right-wing politics, fascism. Both CNN and Lord owe their audience (and Jones) an apology for spreading known falsehoods on the air.

Yes: there Lord was, berating Jones because he wasn't admitting that the Klan was leftist. "And you don't hide and say that's not part of the base of the Democratic Party," he shouted. "That has been, they were the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party according to historians. For God's sake, read your history."

Of course, Rush Limbaugh immediately piled on by embracing Lord's claims: "It was focused on Trump. It was focused on the Klan. It was focused on how the Democrats do this, that they get this idea in their heads and no matter what they fit every event into their narrative.  And in this case the KKK is a bunch of right-wing terrorists.  It doesn't matter where they were formed. It doesn't matter who formed 'em."

Lord had first tried peddling this nonsense (which he hasn't yet committed to print, apparently, other than in brief references) Monday on CNN, telling Margaret Hoover that it was a "leftist hate group": "It is a racist hate group from the left. And that counts. That is important to understand. It is not conservative. It has nothing to do with conservatism. All of these Klan members who have been elected to Congress and U.S. Senate and governorships over the years, supporting Franklin Roosevelt because they like Social Security. Let's get our history straight."

Yes, let's.

It doesn't take much straightening to realize that Lord is just trying out a KKK version of Jonah Goldberg's gambit, in which he successfully persuaded large numbers of conservatives, through a historically inept and misbegotten travesty titled Liberal Fascism, that "properly understood, fascism is a phenomenon of the left." That is, he's simply inverting historical reality on its head and claiming to be ingenious and insightful.

Lord's real problem is that, while Goldberg could at least reference some early organizing documents and distort the presence of a "socialist" element within early fascism into something more meaningful, there is not a scintilla of evidence to support Lord's claims about the KKK being a "leftist" organization with a "progressive" agenda. (Goldberg, for his part, tries to dispose of the presence of the Klan by dismissing them as a mere "creepy fan subculture" -- while it should be obvious that the KKK was much, much more than that.) Of course, it's useful to recall that prior to the 1980s, both parties had both conservative and progressive wings. Lord deliberately manipulates his terminology to obscure the fact that while, yes, in the South of the 1920s, the Klan was a militaristic and terroristic wing of the Jim Crow-loving Democratic Party there, in no shape, form, or fashion was this the "leftist" wing of the Democratic Party. When the members of the Klan were Democrats, as in the 1920s, as well as in the '40s when they called themselves "Dixiecrats," they were conservative Democrats. And ever after the Southern Strategy-fueled party switch of the 1960s and '70s, those conservatives have now become uniformly Republican. Lord plays juvenile word games to pretend that the Democrats of the '20s Klan were "leftist," when they were anything but.

Next, it's important to understand that, as Mark Potok explained to Slate's Leon Neyfakh, the Klan has gone through four distinct historical phases:

• The first came in the immediate wake of the Civil War, when night-riding lynch mobs of masked men did their utmost to undo the gains under Reconstruction for black people (and ultimately succeeded). 
• The second phase came in the 1920s, when a group of men reconstituted the idea of the Klan in the wake of D.W. Griffith's homage to the original Klan, The Birth of a Nation. The other event that inspired the founding of this Klan, besides Griffith's movie, was the lynching of Leo Frank in Alanta in 1915. By the mid-1920s, this version of the Klan had 4 million members, with chapters in every state of the Union, and it enjoyed nationwide respectability -- though that largely had vanished by the 1930s. 
• The third phase came when a group of Atlanta racists revived the Klan locally, once again, in the postwar period, whence it spread throughout the South and was deployed primarily as a murderous and threatening gang of thugs, ultimately responsible for the deaths of numerous black people and white activists during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s.
• The fourth phase -- the current one -- features a mostly diffuse Klan organization, comprised of 30 or so individual groups that favor their own versions of Klan ideology. While the levels of violence emanating from these groups is relatively low-level (the groups are mostly content to hold annual barbecues in which they inevitably complain about minorities and liberals, and then wrap it all up by lighting a cross), these groups attract and harbor violent personalities who frequently act out their beliefs violently, sometimes as "lone wolves."

David Chalmers, in his Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, is unequivocal in placing the Klan, in all of its iterations, firmly on the right of the political spectrum:

Throughout its history, the Klan has been a conservative, not revolutionary, organization. As a vigilante, it has sought to uphold "law and order," white dominance, and traditional morality. To do this it has threatened, flogged, mutilated, and on occasion, murdered. The main purpose of the Klansmen, Kligrapps, Kludds, and Night Hawks, Cyclopses, Titans, Dragons, and Wizards assembled in their Dens, Klaverns, and Klonvokations, rallying in rented cow pastures, and marching in solemn procession through city streets, has been to defend and restore what they conceived as traditional social values. The Klan has bascially been a revitalization movement.

 It's clear that the "leftist" Klan that Lord is referencing is this second iteration (in large part because his argument hinges on connecting Democratic President Woodrow Wilson with this Klan). But while the people comprising this version of the Klan may have been mostly Democrats, they also were uniformly conservative.

The precepts of this Klan at its founding were as follows:

First: To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of the Confederate soldiers.

Second: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States ...

Third: To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity with the laws of the land.

Likewise, the Klan's battle cry was for "100 percent Americanism". One of its more popular tracts was titled "The Klan's Fight for Americanism," and it stated that the Klan

... makes no apologies for its members' attempts to impose their views upon "liberals," immigrants, Catholics, Jews, or peoples of color. Instead it sounds a clarion call for the Klan's "progressive conservatism" and celebrates its influence in American public life.

This is the only reference in any Klan literature to inclining toward anything "progressive" (and in today's politics makes about as much sense as "liberal conservatism"). As history played out, what became clear was that the Klan's idea of "progressive conservatism" was similar in tenor to modern-day "compassionate conservatism" -- the adjective serving mostly to soften and broaden their appeal, while remaining adamantly "conservative." That is, right-wing.

We nowadays think of the Klan as primarily a racial-terrorism organization, but in the 1920s it became about much more than mere racism. Rather, racial intimidation was more an expression of its larger mission -- enforcing, through violence, threats, and death, "traditional values" and "100 percent Americanism." It was essentially populist, certainly, but there was no mistaking it for anything "progressive." The latter, in fact, became its sworn enemy.

Chalmers describes (pp. 32-33) how Col. William J. Simmons, the man most responsible for the revival of the Klan in the 1915-20 period, and the leader of that group that burned a cross atop Stone Mountain in honor of the Frank lynch mob, shifted the Klan's focus from merely attacking blacks to a very broad menu of targets:

Upon being introduced to an audience of Georgia Klansmen, Colonel Simmons silently took a Colt automatic from his pocket and placed it on the table in front of him. Then he took a revolver from another pocket and put it on the table too. Then he unbuckled a cartridge belt and draped it in a crescent shape between the two weapons. Next, without having uttered a word, he drew out a bowie knife and plunged it in the center of the things on the table. "Now let the Niggers, Catholics, Jews, and all the others who disdain my imperial wizardry, come on," he said. The Jews, Mrs. Tyler told newspapermen during a shopping trip in New York, were upset because they know that the Klan "teaches the wisdom of spending American money with American men." To be for the white race, she continued, means to be against all others. Clarke suggested sterilizing the Negro. Simmons explained that the Japanese were but a superior colored race. Never in the history of the world, the Klan believed, had a "mongrel civilization" survived. The major theme, however, was the rich vein of anti-Catholicism, which the Klan was to mine avidly during the 1920s, and it was this more than anything else which made the Klan.

To the Negro, Jew, Oriental, Roman Catholic, and alien, were added dope, bootlegging, graft, night clubs and road houses, violation of the Sabbath, unfair business dealings, sex, marital "goings-on," and scandalous behavior, as the proper concern of the one-hundred-percent American. The Klan organizer was told to find out what was worrying a community and to offer the Klan as a solution.

Simmons' conception of the Klan as a special secret service bustling about spying on radicalism and questionable patriotism and generally reliving its wartime grandeur, was translated into a more enduring system of societal vigilance. The Klan was brought to Muncie, Indiana, by leading businessmen to cope with a corrupt Democratic city government. It entered Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Herrin County, Illinois, to put down bootlegging. When a newly formed Klan chapter would write to Atlanta for suggestions as to what to do first, the response was almost unvaryingly to "clean up the town," an injunction which usually came to rest it emphasis on the enforcement of the small-town version of the Ten Commandments.

Philip Dray, in his history of the "lynching era," At the Hands of Persons Unknown, describes this opportunism on the part of the Klan as well:

Marketed like any other business or lodge association, the Klan was eventually franchised in twenty-seven states and varied its purpose to confront a wide palette of enemies. To a town inundated with unemployed blacks, one historian has pointed out, it was the Klan of the Griffith film; if bootleggers ran amok, the Klan was an auxiliary police outfit; in the face of labor activism, Klan members became corporate thugs and enforcers; where immigrants threatened to overwhelm a city, the Klan stood ready to publicize 100 percent Americanism. As the organization served as a kind of enforcement group for godly values, many clergymen became Klan members of boosters. Jesus Christ himself, it was said, would have been a Klansman.

A history of the Klan by the SPLC explains that the "community values" agenda in short order became a justification for all kinds of violence:

The message was clear--the new Klan was going to mean business. And that soon meant expanding its list of enemies to include Asians, immigrants, bootleggers, dope, graft, night clubs and road houses, violation of the Sabbath, sex, pre- and extra-marital escapades and scandalous behavior. The Klan, with its new mission of social vigilance, soon had organizers scouring the nation, probing for the communities' fears and then exploiting them to the hilt.

And the tactic was an overnight raging success. By the late summer of 1921 nearly 100,000 people had enrolled in the invisible empire, and at ten dollars a head (tax-free since the Klan was a "benevolent" society), the profits were impressive. While Simmons made speeches and tinkered with ritual, Clarke busied himself with expanding the treasury, launching Klan publishing and manufacturing firms and investing in real estate. The future looked very good.

...And its violence was clearly revealed. Under Evans a wave of repression punctuated by lynchings, shootings and whippings swept over the nation in the early and mid-1920's and many communities were firmly in the grasp of the Klan's terror. The victims were usually blacks, Jews, Catholics, Mexicans and various immigrants, but sometimes they were white, Protestant, and female. Klansmen attacked people they considered "immoral" or "traitors" to the white race.

In Alabama, for example, a divorcee with two children was flogged for the crime of remarrying, and then given a jar of Vaseline for her wounds. In Georgia a woman was given 60 lashes for a vague charge of "immorality and failure to go to church." And when her 15-year-old son ran to her rescue, he received the same treatment. In both cases the leaders of the Klansmen responsible turned out to be ministers.

But such instances were not confined to the South--in Oklahoma Klansmen applied the lash to girls caught riding in automobiles with young men, and the Klan in the San Joaquin Valley in California were know to flog and torture women.

In a period when many women were fighting for the vote, for a place in the job market, and for personal and cultural freedom, the Klan claimed to stand for "pure womanhood" and frequently attacked women who sought independence.

Although politicians became increasingly uncomfortable with Klan allies as a result of the turmoil, the success of the Klan candidates across the nation in 1924 buoyed Evans' spirits. His notoriety peaked with a parade of 40,000 Klansmen down Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument in August 1925. Evans boasted of having helped re-elect Coolidge, of having secured passage of strict anti-immigration laws and of having checked the ambitions of Catholics and others intent on "perverting" the nation. All in all, the Klan was riding high in the saddle.

As we previously noted, this Klan briefly became a real political force: a nationwide organization with chapters in all 48 states that briefly became a political powerhouse in a number of states, including Oregon, Indiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Maine, where the Klan played a critical role in the 1924 election of Owen Brewster to the governorship. That same year, the Klan made waves at the Democratic Convention when the Klan-backed candidate, William Gibbs McAdoo of Georgia, declined to denounce them. Al Smith of New York managed to block his nomination, largely on these grounds, and West Virginia's John Davis emerged as the compromise selection. He lost to Calvin Coolidge.

As Chalmers records:

In 1922, the Klan helped elect governors in Georgia, Alabama, California, and Oregon, and came close to knocking Missouri's Jim Reed out of the U.S. Senate. It was reported that perhaps as many as seventy-five members of the lower house had received help from Klan votes. An undetermined, and unguessable, number of congressmen, veterans, and newcomers, had actually joined the hooded order, and E.Y. Clarke was asking the local chapters to suggest likely candidates for the future. The next year, the Klan continued to expand, with its greatest strength developing in the upper Mississippi Valley and in the Great Lakes kingdom of D.C. Stephenson.

All this time, the Klan's propensity for violence became its very byword. In Tulsa, where the Klan was such a prominent and active presence that it kept a public "whipping field" at which it publicly humiliated various miscreants, the violence evenutally erupted into the massive Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, where the resulting death toll of African Americans is estimated to have been between 300 and 3,000.



[More photos from the riot here.]

Klan violence clearly was not relegated strictly to the South, but its was particularly intense there, especially the use of cross burnings to threaten and intimidate blacks. This became especially the case in the 1930s and '40s, when the Klan rose to attempt to stem the oncoming tide of the Civil Rights movement; and in the early 1950s, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling ordering the desegregation of Southern schools actually produced a second revival of the Klan, all of it focused on the "traditional values" of white supremacy and its fruits: Jim Crow, segregation, lynching.


There were thousands of these lynchings. They are the human victims, like Leo Frank, of the Klan who Jeffrey Lord so casually and carelessly whitewashes into victims of leftist violence.

And it is not as if the Klan has gone away since. In the ensuing years, it has remained the implacable enemy not merely of civil rights for blacks, but for any minority, including gays and lesbians. Its activities have remained associated with violence of various kinds, including a broad gamut of hate crimes committed against every kind of non-white, or non-Christian, or for that matter non-conservative.

In the recent past, it has revived its nativist roots by becoming vociferously active in the immigration debate, openly sponsoring anti-immigrant rallies at which the Klan robes have come out:



Somewhat predictably, immigration has become a major point of recruitment for the Klan and other white supremacists. And just as predictably, a sharp spike of bias crimes against Latinos has followed in their wake.

Those are the historical details. Moreover, the Klan in every incarnation -- its original, its second, and its current, has been a creature of right-wing politics. Consider its current program:

-- Anti-Semitism

-- Racial separation

-- The quashing of civil rights for minorities

-- The destruction of federal government power

-- Anti-homosexual

-- Anti-abortion

-- Anti-immigration

What exactly is "liberal" about that? Well, nothing. All of these positions typically are part of what we call right-wing, and in the Klan's case, they are drawn to an extreme degree. The Ku Klux Klan are right-wing extremists by any accounting, and always have been. Indeed, much of their explicit animus has historically been directed at liberals -- as with the fascists, their antiliberalism has been a defining feature for most of their existence.

Moreover, the Klan, as Robert O. Paxton explains in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, was probably the first real manifestation of fascism as an organization, not just in America but anywhere:

... [I]t is further back in American history that one comes upon the earliest phenomenon that seems functionally related to fascism: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans by the Radical Reconstructionists in 1867, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders' eyes, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group's destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.

As Paxton explains, the Klan was fascist not just in its function and the political space it occupied, but in being the embodiment of its ideology, namely:

Although one can deduce from fascist language implicit Social Darwinist assumptions about human nature, the need for community and authority in human society, and the destiny of nations in history, fascism does not base its claims to validity upon their truth. Fascists despise thought and reason, abandon intellectual positions casually, and cast aside many intellectual fellow-travellers. They subordinate thought and reason not to Faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest community.

Elsewhere, Paxton explains:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Likewise, Chalmers' description of the Klan as a "revitalization movement" also happens to confirm the identification of the Klan with American fascism, if we follow Roger Griffin's definition of fascism as "a palingenetic and populist form of ultranationalism" (palingenesis referring to a core myth of phoenix-like national rebirth).

And no, despite any ahistorical poppycock that Jonah Goldberg and Jeffrey Lord might try to sell you, fascism and its iterations are NOT a "phenomenon of the left" at all. Fascism is, and always has been, a cancerous, metastasized version of right-wing populism.

Donald Trump, of course, is currently reminding us all about how that particular beast arises -- and where it comes from. Which is why getting the historical record right, as Lord suggests, really does matter.

The Martrydom of LaVoy Finicum: What the Newest ‘Patriot’ Sainthood Means for the Rest of Us

 

[A heavily edited version of this post appeared in the Washington Post.]

They came carrying signs Monday in Burns, Oregon.

“FBI Go Home – LaVoy Can’t”

“Peace Can’t Be Achieved Through Murder”

“LaVoy’s Voice Lives On”

“Federal Supremacists Murdered An Innocent Man”

“YOU Murdered LaVoy!”

They came, a couple hundred strong, from around the interior West – from Idaho, and Washington, and Montana, and Utah. The hotels in Burns had all sold out of rooms, and few had places to stay except area campgrounds. So many of them came prepared for winter camping, replete with canvas tents and their own supplies of firewood.

In their minds, the cause was worth the trouble and discomfort. They came to protest on behalf of a man killed at a police checkpoint less than a week earlier, on Jan. 26.

His face – a skinny, bespectacled and pale man with a cowboy hat – adorned some of the signs that the protesters carried, mixed in with the American flags they carried, and a yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag or two. His name: Robert “LaVoy” Finicum.

He was the focus of their vocal chorus on Monday, even as the collection of antigovernment protesters came up against a wall of counter-protesters, a crowd even larger than theirs, comprised largely of local and area residents.

For some four hours, they stood off out in the cold, angrily exchanging shouts and chants. The “Patriots” announced that they wanted the sheriff and a local judge arrested for Finicum’s murder. That was met with jeers from the crowd of locals, whose signs proudly supported their local law enforcement as well as the federal agents in their midst.

The “Patriots” remained focused on what they called an “assassination.”

“Cold-blooded murder! Cold-blooded murder!” chanted the protesters. “He was executed!” shouted one.

After awhile, a new chant: “FBI killed LaVoy! FBI killed LaVoy!”

It is not only at “Patriot” demonstrations – right-wing websites are similarly running wild with rumors and conspiracy theories. It has become starkly clear: LaVoy Finicum is the latest in a long line of right-wing martyrs.

That outcome, no doubt, was exactly what the FBI was hoping to circumscribe when, two days after the shooting, they released video of the shooting and the circumstances leading up to it, as well as afterward. They knew all too well, of course, that already a panoply of conspiracy theories and wild speculation – all of it pointing the finger at federal authorities as out-of-control bullies – were brewing.

But if they were hoping to nip the speculation in the bud, they should have known better. The “Patriot” movement would never let a good martyr go to waste. And there has seemingly never been a circumstance yet to which they cannot apply some kind of wildly speculative conspiracy theory.

A video still from the moments before LaVoy Finicum was shot.

The video, which gave a bird’s-eye view of the arrests of the militants who took over a federal wildlife refuge center in rural Oregon, showed mostly a series of nonviolent arrests along a snowbound highway, beginning with ringleader Ammon Bundy and his crew in an SUV. But one moment in that video will now be seared in infamy into the nation’s collective consciousness: the moment when LaVoy Finicum was killed.

It is a grim and chilling scene that unfolds in the video: After the initial pullover, in which Ammon Bundy and two others surrender peacefully and another militant, Ryan Payne, climbs out of the white pickup being driven by Finicum, the truck takes off at high speed, only to be forced into a snowbank by a roadblock a short distance up the road. At that point, Finicum jumps out of the truck, holds up his arms as if in surrender initially, and then is shot by an Oregon State Patrol officer off to his side as he appears to reach into his jacket.

Slow-motion enhanced video analysis by the staff of The Oregonian makes clear that the FBI’s description of the shooting is largely accurate – that Finicum resisted arrest, shouted at officers as he emerged with his hands up (one of the passengers in truck agrees, saying that Finicum yelled at them to “Just shoot me”), and then reached for a pocket of his jacket that they said contained a handgun.

And indeed, most police officers are taught in basic training to shoot a resisting suspect in such a situation, as the OSP trooper did. Police are taught a “Use of Force Continuum” in which they respond to escalating force by a suspect with equal force. Any suspect resisting arrest who pulls or reaches for a gun can expect to be shot, regardless of the situation. Even a sympathetic “Patriot” blogger who reviewed the video agreed, noting that Finicum “made a motion consistent with drawing a weapon, and the officer was forced to respond.”

Greg Gilbertson, a police use-of-force investigator and specialist in the issue who frequently serves as an expert witness in court trials, said that after reviewing the video, it was clear to him that “most law enforcement agencies would characterize this shooting as ‘justified.’”

Gilbertson said that if Finicum was the driver, he “certainly escalated this situation unnecessarily, especially when he nearly struck the officer standing on the side of the road. “

“In addition, Mr. Finicum is seen reaching into his pockets or the interior of his jacket a number of times as the Oregon Trooper approached him,” Gilbertson said. “Mr. Finicum's actions are sometimes referred to as a ‘furtive movement,’ which the trooper could articulate placed him in imminent fear for his personal safety, especially in light of the fact that these activists were known to be armed and had made a number of inflammatory statements.”

Regardless, Finicum’s defenders claim the shooting was unjustified. His family members issued a statement saying that "what we believe the video shows is that LaVoy was being fired upon before he even got out of the truck."

Finicum, they said, left the pickup in order to draw gunfire away from its three other occupants. "We believe he had already been shot before he ever lowered his hands," the statement continued. "We believe some of his hand movements were a natural reflex to being shot."

Finicum, a 54-year-old Mormon rancher from Arizona who had been a participant in the takeover of the Bundy-led Malheur National Wildlife refuge since it began on Jan. 2, had indeed foreshadowed his own martyrdom. A week into the standoff, he had told reporters: “I’m not going to end up in prison. I would rather die than be caged. And I’ve lived a good life.”

That was consistent with what the video showed his actions in the fatal showdown to be: an act of resistance unto death, and a willingness to die for one’s cause. The act of someone determined to be a martyr.

This kind of talk had been rife in the camp of the Malheur occupiers, who began their standoff with authorities by declaring that they were seizing the refuge and its center on behalf of “the people,” and cited a long list of pseudo-legal “constitutionalist” claims to back up their occupation. The bottom line: They believe the federal government has no business owning large tracts of public land.

Understanding that federal authorities were likely to resist these claims, a number of the militants made bellicose remarks that they were “willing to die” and “to kill or be killed” to defend their position. One of them, a Phoenix militiaman named Jon Ritzheimer (who was later arrested in Arizona without incident), posted a bathetic plea to his children explaining that “Daddy swore an oath” and might not ever return home to them. Becoming a martyr for the movement was clearly on their minds.

With his death, Finicum’s supporters in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement were more than eager to give him that status. At the site of his death, alongside Highway 395 in a lonely, wooded stretch of rural Oregon, they have erected a makeshift memorial in his honor, replete with a cross, voluminous flowers, and handmade signs: “RIP LaVoy Finicum, A True American Hero,” and “The Fight Isn’t Over.” Someone attached a cowboy hat to the cross emblazoned with the words, “An American Hero.” (A few days later, locals tore down the memorial, furthering angering the “Patriot” contingent, who went out and rebuilt it.)

The elevation to martyr’s status was almost instantaneous, in fact. On the evening of the arrests, Nevada State Rep. Michelle Fiore, a Bundy ally, sent out a tweet to her followers: “My heart & prays [sic] go out to LaVoy Finicum's family he was just murdered with his hands up in Burns OR.”

Another Nevada legislator affiliated with the “Patriots,” Rep. Shelly Shelton, compared Finicum to Jesus and Moses in a Facebook post: “In any given generation there are men who are willing to stand for what they believe,” Shelton wrote. “Most of the time they are demonized and the uninformed are made to believe they are criminals. From Moses who killed an Egyptian for abusing his people, to Jesus who died on a cross as a condemned criminal, many of those who operate outside the box and promote love and justice over the current form of government are treated as outcasts and many times murdered.”

Other “Patriots” followed suit in short order. “Tonight peaceful Americans were attacked on a remote road for supporting the Constitution,” read a graphic meme accompanying the post. “One was killed. Who are the terrorists?”

“LaVoy has left us, but his sacrifice will never be far from the lips of those who love liberty,” read another post on the Bundy Ranch page. “You cannot defeat us. Our blood is seed.”

At Monday’s rally in Burns, the belief that Finicum had been foully murdered by out-of-control federal agents was rampant, regardless of what the video showed. One protester showed up with red holes in a flannel shirt she wore to demonstrate how Finicum was “shot in the back.”

“He had his hands in the air!” she insisted.

“LaVoy’s blood is on your hands,” another told the counter-demonstrators, while squirting out a red blood-colored liquid into the snow in front of them.

“Let the camera decide!” an angry man shouted. After locals resisted an attempt by the “Patriots” to enter the courthouse, the same man screamed at them: “Oathbreakers! Oathbreakers!”

“The murderers are over there!” shouted another, pointing at the locals out to support their county officials. “They have blood on their hands!”

For the antigovernment “Patriot” movement, this embrace of martyrdom isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, an essential element of what makes such extremist belief systems tick. Born out of the whitewashed remnants of the radical racist-right movements of the 1960s and ‘70s – particularly the viciously anti-Semitic and racist Posse Comitatus movement, which then morphed into the “militia movement” of the 1990s, and which provided the structural framework for most of today’s claims by so-called “constitutionalists” and “Patriots” – this movement has a long history of attracting violent actors who are willing both to kill and be killed in the name of their extreme worldview.

The core of the “Patriot” system is the belief that the Constitution, as originally written, severely limited the scope of government powers to waging wars and other military and diplomatic ventures, and little else. In their view, the sheriff is actually the most powerful authority of American law, and that not only is federal ownership of public lands unconstitutional, but so are such federal law-enforcement agencies as the FBI. This helps explain, for instance, why the occupiers and their supporters have displayed such deep animus toward Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward, who refused to go along with their nonsensical campaign from the get-go.

It also helps explain why they attempted the takeover of the refuge in the first place. The ranching Bundy family and their cohort subscribe to a particular Mormon-flavored version of “Patriot” beliefs which also contends that public lands belong in the hands of resource users like themselves. Not surprisingly, this agenda folds in neatly with right-wing corporate-funded entities who are campaigning to have public lands taken out of federal ownership for their own extractive and profit-making purposes.

Largely because it rests on a foundation of false information, distorted history, conspiracy theories and unadulterated fantasy, the “Patriot” movement also attracts followers of a particularly irrational stripe: people who reach conclusions based on their personal beliefs and biases first and then go looking for evidence to support it. Falsity and gross distortion are not a problem with the evidence these True Believers collect, and angry emotional outbursts are typical of the rhetorical style employed in their defense. What’s key in all events is that these followers envision themselves in the heroic mold – they are all God-fearing, flag-waving, America-loving “Patriots,” by God, and don’t dare suggest otherwise.

Sociologist James Aho studied these groups in the 1990s, and his essential 1994 work, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy examines this dynamic in detail. Envisioning oneself as heroic, as Aho explains, requires the naming of an enemy, which means that much of their energy is devoted to synthesizing an enemy out of whole cloth when none are so readily apparent in real life – in this case, naming the federal government (and, in the eventual conspiracist drift these beliefs take, the New World Order) the mortal enemies not just of themselves but of all God-fearing, gun-loving Americans, inventing “tyranny” in a land where civil liberties, in reality, remain largely intact.

But the ultimate act of heroism, in this universe, is to become a martyr in the name of “liberty.” There’s a long history of this on the American far right:

• In 1983, a North Dakota farmer named Gordon Kahl went on a multi-state shooting rampage in which three law-enforcement officers were killed. Kahl was an ardent follower of radical Posse Comitatus theories who had done prison time for refusing to file taxes, and believed that federal marshals and sheriff’s deputies alike were tools of Satan.
• In 1984, a group of radical members of the Aryan Nations based in northeastern Washington state went on a multi-state crime rampage, mostly robbing banks and armored cars, culminating in the assassination of radio talk-show host Alan Berg in Denver. Most members were arrested by FBI agents, but the ringleader, Robert Mathews, refused to surrender and died when agents lobbed flares into the house where he had holed up and it was consumed in flames. Neo-Nazis and skinheads still hold annual commemorations at the Whidbey Island locale where the standoff occurred.
• Randy and Vicki Weaver, a northern Idaho couple associated with the nearby Aryan Nations compound, were surrounded in 1992 at their home on Ruby Ridge after Weaver refused to surrender to authorities on a weapons charge, and their 14-year-old son was killed in an early exchange while Vicki was killed the next day in a barrage of sniper fire.
• A cult calling themselves the Branch Davidians, based outside of Waco, Texas, came under investigation for a number of weapons violations, and when federal ATF agents came to their compound to arrest leader David Koresh and others, were fired on, and in their fierce exchange that ensued, four ATF officers were killed, while six members of the cult also died. After a standoff that lasted 51 days, the FBI led an attempt to raid the compound with tear gas that ended disastrously when cult leaders set the building aflame, and 76 people died, including Koresh.

These martyrdoms all had rippling effects, often into each other. Kahl’s death inspired Mathews to engage in his rampage. The Weavers’ tragic fate came about largely because federal authorities were determined to crack down hard on the activities out the Hayden Lake compound of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho.

And the deaths of Vicki Weaver and the Branch Davidians became a battle cry for “Patriot”/militia movement followers then: “Ruby Ridge and Waco” even today is synonymous with “outrageous overreach by federal law enforcement,” even in the mainstream. So it was not at all a surprise to see it referenced in Oregon by the leader of one of the main regional “Patriot” groups defending the occupiers.

“We’ve got a third one. There was Ruby Ridge and Waco, now there is Burns,” B.J. Soper, leader of the Pacific Patriots Network, told Raw Story.

According to Aho, there is always a price to this martyrdom, as it comes to embody the ritual and “reification” process – that is, the squaring of accounts, the dispensation of justice – in the minds of the True Believers. That amounts to a kind of expiation in the form of retributive violence, the kind that was unleashed on the federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, by Tim McVeigh and his “Patriot” compadres.

That is the dark cloud that now hangs over the whole affair, beyond the deaths and injuries that came about because of the Bundys’ quixotic quest to prove their “constitutionalist” fantasia somehow legitimate. The death of anyone, even someone resisting arrest, is always deeply unfortunate, and it goes without saying that LaVoy Finicum deserved a better fate, even if he did seem to seek it out. But his martyrdom now means that someone, somewhere, someday, will be seeking retribution.

As in the 1990s, virtually everyone who works for a federal agency will have to become more concerned about his or her personal and work-related security. This is acutely the case for federal land managers, including all employees of the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, as well as the National Park Service, whose security their federal overseers will need to take especially seriously in the coming months.

Out in the field, many rangers and land managers are exposed and out in the open, and will make inviting targets for the angry radicals who have made it abundantly clear they see such federal employees as their named enemy. The law-enforcement wings of the agencies most at risk of being such targets would be wise to bolster their ranks and improve their intelligence gathering when it comes to dealing with the threat of another takeover, or some other incident in which, once again, more people inevitably get hurt. People on all sides.

That is why it was so encouraging to see the depth of the opposition to the “Patriot” protesters in Burns on Monday. According to most accounts, the locals from Harney County who came out to defend their law-enforcement officers and the FBI from the announced invasion of their town by a parade of “Patriot” protesters (the majority of whom came from neighboring states) were impressive in size and passion, and outnumbered the right-wing contingent that was demanding the arrest of the sheriff and a local judge, among others, for Finicum’s death. The pro-sheriff group surrounded the courthouse and would not allow the protesters to approach it (though county officials, apparently, had locked the doors in any event).

Their message, time after time, chant after chant: “Go home!”

They too bore signs, all of them handmade.

“Stand Down, Leave Our Town”

“Militia – Thank You For Your Work But You’re Fired! Go Home!”

“We Support Our County Sheriff and FBI”

“More Would Be Here, But They Have Jobs – Go Home!”

“Militias – You Don’t Have to Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here!”

The local community’s defiance of their agenda took the wind out of the sails of the “Patriots” on Monday, and most of them had cleared out of Burns by Tuesday morning, no longer willing to camp in the snow.

If they were disconcerted by the resistance, however, they showed no signs of it. Already this weekend, “Patriot” groups began organizing more events commemorating LaVoy Finicum’s martyrdom.

On Saturday, an event was held in Boise, Idaho, to protest Finicum’s death (“In today’s society, our citizens are being gunned down by our law enforcement unjustly,” claims the flier advertising the rally). Participants were asked to bring signs reading “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” – an obvious reference to the signs carried by black protesters last summer in Ferguson, MO.

Similar commemorations are being planned around the country – from nearby John Day, Ore., where a candlelight vigil was held, to events in Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Washington state, Ohio, Colorado, Massachusetts, and South Carolina.

And so the American far right’s endless cycle of violence and victimhood marches along.

Last Holdouts at Refuge Wanted FBI to Surrender, And Gun-Toting 'Patriots' to 'Get Rid Of' Critics

The four people who remained holed up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge until Friday morning, when they were arrested, had in the days leading up to the arrests been releasing videos to their YouTube account indicating that they, much like their now-arrested leader Ammon Bundy, believed they had the feds surrounded.

And that it was just a matter of time before good, God-fearing, red-blooded American patriots stand up and say “enough is enough” and send the FBI and Oregon State Patrol packing.

Or something like that.

The videos, posted on the occupiers’ YouTube channel, provide a glimpse inside the straggling remnant of antigovernment “Patriots” whose Jan. 2 occupation of the wildlife refuge largely came to an end Feb. 1 with the arrests of ringleaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy and eight others, as well as the death of compatriot Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, who was shot while resisting arrest. While those people now face a variety of federal felony charges, a tiny remnant kept up their armed takeover of the refuge center, encouraged by movement patriarch Cliven Bundy,  who was arrested Thursday night in Portland.

The foursome – David Fry, a 27-year-old from Blanchester, Ohio; Sean Anderson, 48, and his wife, Sandy Anderson, 47, of Riggins, Idaho; and Jeff Banta, 46, of Elko, Nevada – apparently believe so fervently in their far-right interpretation of the law that they consider it self-evident that federal lands ownership, as well as the very existence of federal law-enforcement agencies such as the FBI, are unconstitutional and illegitimate.

Fry in particular has been active as the person primarily posting the videos, not to mention behaving erratically. In one of the videos, he seemingly calls for his fellow “Patriots” to start using their guns to deal with their critics as well as federal law enforcement:

We’ve been hearing reports of people desecrating LaVoy Finicum’s – you know, his death site. People going there, trashing the memorial there. And that’s the kind of people we’re dealing with nowadays, just absolute trash, lowlife, scumbags, with no morals, no remorse for the dead. You know, these people kill babies, for crying out loud, sleeping in the mother’s womb, and they think it’s OK. And that’s the people that we’re fighting against.

And so all the good people in America and in the world need to realize that these are the people that we need to get rid of. We can’t let these people trample on us, you know, siding with the government and taking our guns. Trying to put us all in jail.

So when are the good people going to speak up and stand against such despicable behavior? You know, you see them try to take down memorials because they’re racist – you know, stupid shit like that. How much longer are the American people going to deal with that? How much longer are the American people going to sit here and wait and let the FBI snuff people like us out.

… I think that people need to realize that it’s time that the good people stand up, bear arms, and tell all these evil, trash people to piss off. And we’re making a stand. And if they want to try getting in the way – we got guns! They don’t believe in guns, so we don’t have to worry about them, they don’t have guns, they’re stupid. So instead of letting these guys verbally abuse us, you know, going out and trashing down memorials, things like that, you know, it’s time to take a stand.  It’s time to fight. And it’s time to show these scumbags who’s really in charge of this country.

And it’s time the Patriots of America showed the feds, we’re tired of them. Let’s kick these guys out of this country, or out of this state, out of all your states. Get the feds out of there. They don’t belong in our states. They’re useless. They still haven’t put Hillary behind bars.

In another video (titled “Shove your charges where the sun don’t shine”) Fry demonstrated his instability by ranting about how the FBI had just informed that he and the others now faced more federal charges because they had been building fortifications at the refuge with earth-moving machinery. Fry then takes viewers on a ride as he hops into a white pickup with government plates and careers off at a high rate of speed, wheeling about and shouting: “Maybe I should do a donut in this, yeah!”

As the pickup is seen pulling back up to the encampment at high speed, Fry shouts: “Yeah! That’s what I think of you people. Fuck your charges. I’m gonna do what I gotta do to protect myself. Fortify for what? Anything, I don’t wanna do it. Because why? I’m a Patriot.”

Another video posted on the occupiers’ channel showed Sean and Sandy Anderson explaining why they were continuing to hold out, even after the earlier arrests and the departure of the rest of the encampment. Sean Anderson had previously made something of a name for himself on the Internet by posting a video rant about a looming “bloodbath” in the immediate aftermath of the Feb. 1 arrests.

In this version, seated on a couch with his wife, Sean Anderson is in a much more reasonable mood, explaining why they were staying put:

They want us to give ourselves in and admit we made a mistake. We didn’t. We’re good people. We never hurt anyone, we haven’t killed anyone. That’s on their side. So what are they to do with us? They either let us go, drop all charges because we’re good people, or they come in and kill us. How’s that gonna sit with America? How’s that gonna sit with God?

You know, we’re looking for some help here. We need the American people to pressure the federal government to go away – go back where they belong. Not in the states – give the rights back to the people. Let us have our constitutional freedoms.

By shutting our phones off, that eliminated our First Amendment rights. By not letting the media here, that eliminates their First Amendment rights. Do you people not realize that the government controls your rights unless you stand up and fight for them?

The four of us here are standing up for your rights. I hope someone will stand for our rights.

We’re good people.

Sandy Anderson can be heard adding: “We just want to go home.”

Antigovernment Movement's Rank and File Want Retaliation for Arrests, Death in Oregon, But Their Leaders Are Reluctant

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Amid comparisons to Ruby Ridge and Waco, anger is pervasive on the far right, but militia leaders are mostly calling for ‘cooler heads’ to prevail.

While most of the mainstream media and other observers of the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon took a wait-and-see approach to the arrests of eight of the militants involved – and particularly the death of a ninth, Arizona rancher Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, who was gunned down during the roadside confrontation just outside of Burns – there was little doubt among militia supporters on the far right about the meaning of it all.

The “feds” have declared war on them.

"It appears that America was fired upon by our government," one of the militants wrote on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page. "One of liberty's finest patriots is fallen. He will not go silent into eternity. Our appeal is to heaven."

“Tonight peaceful Americans were attacked on a remote road for supporting the Constitution,” read a graphic meme accompanying the post. “One was killed. Who are the terrorists?”

Perhaps the most striking declaration came from one of the militants still occupying the refuge, who appeared in a video released from the compound showing the men using earth-moving machinery to apparently dig a trench and create an earthen berm, while he and others patrolled with their assault-style rifles and ranted at the camera, pleading to their fellow “Patriots” to come and aid them.

“There are no laws in this United States now!” the man declared angrily. “This is a free-for-all Armageddon. Any LEO or military or law enforcement or feds that stand up and fuck their oath — don’t abide by their oath — are the enemy!”

“If they stop you from getting here, kill them!”

Leading the parade of declarations that Finicum was mowed down in cold blood by FBI agents was Michelle Fiore, the Republican legislator from Nevada who has been a supporter of the Bundy family since their April 2014 standoff in that state. She sent out a tweet on Tuesday night making that very accusation, and it immediately spread like wildfire: “My heart & prays [sic] go out to LaVoy Finicum's family he was just murdered with his hands up in Burns OR.”

“LaVoy has left us, but his sacrifice will never be far from the lips of those who love liberty,” read another post on the Bundy Ranch page. “You cannot defeat us. Our blood is seed.”

Northwest “Patriot” leaders also chimed in. “It’s a dark day in America, a dark day for liberty,” said Washington “liberty speaker” Gavin Seim, who warned that “we stand on the brink of revolution.”

“We can no longer allow the government to murder and abuse and terrorize,” he declared in a video released Wednesday. “Will we allow this government to continue slaughtering, and to set an example that we must bow to them alone? …

“These criminals spilled the blood of patriots,” he continued. “They declared war on law and liberty. And this has been coming for a long time.”

 “I'm beyond pissed,” declared another “Patriot” named Denise Copper in a comment on the Bundy Ranch page. “They murdered an American. This intimidation has strengthened my resolve. We must rise up and take our country back, now!”

“What the government did is kill someone in order to take a rancher’s land,” wrote Facebook user Celesta Piliponis. “This is what the whole protest is all about … The BLM is doing it all over the U.S.”

“We’re having our constitutional rights stolen right out from under us by a corrupt government because too many people are uninformed. One day we are going to wake up and recognize we could have prevented this.”

Although Ammon Bundy’s attorney delivered a message to the men still occupying the refuge center urging them to leave, that message was greeted with skepticism. A post on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page – which was later removed – insisted instead on making a call to arms.

“From Ammon’s wife, Lisa: Ammon would not have called for the patriots to leave,” it read. “We have lost a life but we are not backing down. He didn’t spill his blood in vain! Hold your ground … Ranchers come and stand! Committee of Safety come and stand! Militia come and stand!”

Another occupier insisted that their fellow militiamen had a moral duty to come to their aid.

"You have an obligation to proceed to the Harney County Resource Center [the occupiers’ name for the refuge center] immediately, in order to protect the patriots still there," declared a militant named Gary Hunt on the Operation Mutual Defense discussion board. "If you fail to arrive, you will demonstrate by your own actions that your previous statements to defend life, liberty, and property were false."

“I’m putting III Percenters of Washington state on standby,” read a Facebook post from another Northwest “Patriot.” “Prepare yourselves. FBI, Oregon state patrol and the county sheriff ambushed their convoy. They fired on them before they could even got stopped. They shot these men before they could even get stopped. They shot these men with murder in their hearts.”

However, most of the leaders of the Northwest “Patriot” contingent were reluctant to issue any kind of clarion call, and instead counseled caution. The Pacific Patriots Network, one of the Bundys’ chief militia support groups, issued a statement: “We will not pursue any action until all of the facts have been pieced together regarding the traffic stop and the arrest of Ammon Bundy. During this time, cooler heads must prevail. We do not wish to inflame the current situation and will engage in open dialogue until all of the facts have been gathered.”

Similarly, the Douglas County, Ore., chapter of the Oath Keepers told people to stay home: “All those wishing to go and support the Patriots in Burns, OR, are being asked to stay put temporarily,” read their statement. “The reason for this will be given Thursday night at the Douglas County general meeting of DC Oath Keepers.”

And the main website of the “Three Percenter” militia movement similarly shut down revenge talk, saying “there is no call to arms at this time. There is no request for people to go to Oregon. The refuge and surrounding areas are under federal control and anyone traveling there to show support is being turned around and/or taken into custody. Right now, we ask that all patriots see this as a victory in the sense that there was no slaughter, like was asked, and that our demands were met. We are not looking for ‘vengeance’ for the fallen.”

Conspiracist radio host Alex Jones, a longtime antigovernment movement supporter who was skeptical of the standoff from the start, wrote: “This is not our Lexington.  It’s not our Concord.  It’s not the kick off of some new physical war. We’re in an information war, we’re actually starting to win it. So the answer is not physically to start going after the Feds, or the police, or any of this.”
However, that did not prevent Jones from indulging in the theory that Finicum had been murdered with his hands in the air, posting an “eyewitness” account from a woman who claims to have been riding in the same car as Finicum.

Many of the “Patriots” compared the Oregon showdown with two events that helped spur the movement into life in the 1990s: “We’ve got a third one. There was Ruby Ridge and Waco, now there is Burns,” B.J. Soper of the Pacific Patriots Network told Raw Story.

That view was pervasive on the far-right discussion boards, including those at neo-Nazi websites such as Stormfront, where one of the commenters acidly observed: “Just typical of the New World Order … the Devil’s Government. Should be a lesson for others you can’t win in this Empire. Randy Weaver and many others have been right over the years. All fought the good fight and so have the militia. Should be a rally call for our people working together for a secure future for our people.”

In case anyone there was unsure about the relevance of the showdown, a Stormfront “sustaining member” named “PrairieSister” chimed in: “This is a direct, frontal assault on White America by the hostile, occupation government in Washington, D.C. The authorities shoot and kill a White man for exercising civil rights while blacks, browns and their liberal enablers get protected and publicly lauded for exercising the same civil rights.”

Oregon Militants Try to Recruit a ‘Constitutional’ Sheriff From Neighboring County, But Fail

Sheriff Dave Ward of Harney County, Oregon

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Since so much of their extremist worldview hinges on the idea that the county sheriff is the highest authority in the land, the “constitutionalists” who seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., last week have been extremely vocal about their displeasure with Sheriff David Ward of Harney County.

Ward, they say, has failed in his “constitutional duty” to defend ranchers in his county against the federal government. It’s widely believed the sheriff is one of the chief targets of the “citizens grand jury” the Ammon Bundy-led invaders plan to convene soon.

Sheriff Glenn Palmer of Grant County, Oregon

So the militiamen recently turned to a sheriff they believed to be more sympathetic to their cause:  Glenn Palmer, the sheriff of Grant County, which is adjacent to Harney County directly to the north.

According to Palmer, the men showed up in the town of John Day and arranged a meeting at a local restaurant. In the end, they failed to get what they came for –– Palmer’s assistance.

“I had no idea who I was meeting with when we had lunch yesterday,” he said. “I walked in, I realized who they were and I sat and listened to them. ... They actually wanted me to come down there and make a stand, and I said, ‘not without the sheriff’s blessing.’”

The men had reason to believe that Palmer would be sympathetic to their cause. Palmer calls himself a “constitutional sheriff” and is not only a member in good standing of the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), but was named that organization’s “lawman of the year” in 2012. He also traveled to Washington, D.C., in 2014 to participate in a CSPOA-led meeting with two U.S. senators about immigration.

Palmer’s claim to fame among their ranks lies in his feud with the U.S. Forest Service over policing powers in Grant County. Palmer told USFS officials that their rangers only had jurisdiction in the federal building in John Day.

And while the sheriff was unwilling to go to Harney County to help bolster the Bundys’ cause, Palmer told the East Oregonian that while he has “a pretty good working relationship” with the neighboring sheriff, he was also unwilling to go to Burns to support Sheriff Ward.

“About the only thing (Ward) really told me is I’m welcome to come down there if I would shame and humiliate them into giving up and I said, ‘No, I won’t do that,”’ Palmer said. “I’m not in the business of denouncing or shaming or humiliating anybody.”

Palmer described the participants in the takeover as “patriots,” and generally spoke of the occupation in glowing terms: “I think it’s brought some things to light that might not have otherwise got the attention that they did. … I do believe that the resolution and solution to the way this is going to be handled, if it’s handled properly, could have a long-lasting effect on our county as well.”

He was also clear in his view that such an outcome would require the government to make concessions.

“I believe the government is going to have to concede to something,” he said. “I don’t think these guys are going to give up without knowing that they’ve done something that benefits the people of our country or our region.”

CSPOA president Richard Mack, who participated in the rally in Burns supporting two local ranchers whose imminent imprisonment served as the Bundys’ excuse for the takeover later that day, initially backed away from the protest, saying the “CSPOA does not support or condone the occupation.”

But in a video released earlier this week, Mack told right-wing interviewer Joshua Cook that while he disagreed with the takeover tactically, he fully supported the ideology behind it, explaining that it was a logical response to federal “tyranny.”



“The media that wants to label Ammon Bundy as a nut and extremist, that is a lie,” he said. "I don’t agree with what Ammon’s doing, I’ve told Ammon so. But Ammon Bundy is a friend of mine; he is a good man, he is a good person. Anybody who knows him, they’ll tell you the same.”

Mack not only excoriated David Ward in the interview – saying “the sheriff of Harney County should have stopped this”– he called for sheriffs around the country to begin arresting federal officials, who he claimed were just as guilty of arson: “Every sheriff now, in this country, needs to start filing charges against federal officials who do the same thing, and charge those people with domestic terrorism and arson and put them in prison, just as they did the Hammonds.”

For his part, Ward has been clear and outspoken about the antigovernment militiamen who have invaded his county, telling them repeatedly that they need to pack up and “go home.”

Ward recently excoriated the Bundy group and other militiamen for the reports of intimidating and threatening behavior that have beset residents of Burns since even before the standoff got under way. According to Ward, some federal employees have been harassed in town while grocery shopping or running errands, while others have reported vehicles following them and parking outside their homes.

"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," Ward said. "If they did, they, too, would work to bring this situation to a peaceful close."

Ward, who has weathered death threats from the militiamen’s supporters, has received the official support of the Western States Sheriffs Association, which noted in its press release that “the WSSA does not support efforts of any individual or groups who utilize intimidation, threats or fear in order to further an agenda.”

He also has broad support in Harney County, where local crowds gathered to discuss the standoff have made overwhelmingly clear their support for his tough approach to the militiamen. “This county is a united family and we don’t need people to come here from someplace else and tell us how to live our lives,” Ward told one community gathering. They gave him a standing ovation.

Infighting Over Oregon Militia Takeover Reveals Deep Divisions Among ‘Patriots’

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
 
Protest events organized by antigovernment movement "Patriots  have a long history of being internally contentious affairs, and this week’s standoff with federal authorities in Burns, Ore., is no exception.

The internal dissent over the invasion of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by Ammon and Ryan Bundy and a group of out-of-state militiamen has, in fact, been very public. Indeed, the majority of “Patriot” and “constitutionalist” organizers have adamantly denounced the takeover and pleaded with the Bundy brothers to back off.

For their part, the Bundys and their militia cohort have been defiant, insisting that the cause of the Hammond family – the ranchers whose arson convictions provided the centerpiece of the original protest last Saturday that led to the takeover – is worth “taking a stand” over.

But other “Patriots” who participated in the Saturday protest disavowed the takeover, notably the leadership of the contingent of militiamen from the “III Percent of Idaho” organization who had traveled from Boise to participate.

“The 3% of Idaho, 3% of Oregon, The Oregon Constitutional Guard, and PPN organizations in no way condone nor support these actions,” announced a press release. “They do not mirror our vision, mission statement, or views in regards to upholding the Constitution, The Rule of Law, or Due Process.”

Similarly, “constitutionalist” Sheriff Richard Mack – who was present at the Saturday rally as well – issued a statement denouncing the action: “CSPOA does not support or condone the occupation by those individuals who have taken over the Federal Wildlife building just outside Burns, OR. With all our hearts we appeal to all those occupying the federal facility to immediately vacate the building and to go home to their families!”

Likewise, Stewart Rhodes, president of the Oath Keepers, the antigovernment group that was a major participant in the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014, backed away from any involvement in the takeover.

“By doing this, they have given Obama the best New Years present he could hope for – an example of militia movement/patriot aggression, which gives up the high ground while also having the least credibility and support from the locals possible, after lying to them, and also the least support from the patriot community, who were also blind-sided by Ammon and Ryan Payne,” read a statement issued by Rhodes.



Conspiracist radio host Alex Jones took that speculation to the next level, claiming on his daily show that the Oregon standoff was actually the work of agents provocateur who had supposedly swindled the Bundys into taking this course of action.

“Guaranteed provocateurs are showing up and other things are happening, the whole Soros group is saying, ‘Here are our white terrorists, here are our cowboy-hat wearing terrorists,’ it gives them the backdrop they need, they want to start a civil war,” he told his national audience.

He went on: “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t let Obama be successful when it comes to starting civil unrest and riots in this country. They will use that as a civil emergency to bring in a type of soft martial law.”

Mike Vanderboegh, the national cofounder of the “III Percent” movement, was equally conspiratorial and vociferous at his blog: “My initial reaction was to observe that at least afterward we’ll know who the federal snitches are because they will be the only ones who survive the raid to take back the building,” he wrote.

“There is nothing on the talking heads channels as yet, but by Monday, when Obama meets with his Attorney General on the subject of citizen disarmament, you can bet the farm that this will play right into that narrative. Perfect timing. You’ve got to give the federal handlers of these pukes credit. This is precisely the sort of offensive action on the part of the ‘militia terrorists’ that they needed.”

Ammon Bundy and the militiamen accompanying him have been defiant. One of the militia leaders, Jon Ritzheimer of Phoenix – who has been previously involved in organizing armed anti-Muslim events at mosques around the nation – filmed a much-mocked video of himself bidding farewell to his family, which included some shots at Rhodes and the Oath Keepers.




“I am 100 percent willing to lay my life down to fight against tyranny in this country,” a teary-eyed Ritzheimer declared. Then he launched into a rant against what he called a “smear” campaign against the Hammonds, saying it wasn’t true that they wanted to turn themselves in, because they were being coerced.

He named the perpetrator: “Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, saying, ‘Well, they want to turn themselves in, so it’s, they have their right to turn themselves in.’ By your logic, I guess we shouldn’t offer any help to these veterans who want to commit suicide. Just let them suck-start their 9-mil, because it’s their right.”

Ammon Bundy also issued a videotaped response to Rhodes and other critics, claiming that he had been called by God to stand up on behalf of the Hammonds:




“I have respect for Stewart Rhodes,” Bundy said. “But he does not understand what is truly transpiring, or he has chosen to be in opposition.”

Bundy went on to explain that he had come to envision the plan to take over the wildlife refuge because God led him there. “And so I am asking you to come to Harney County – to make the decision right now, of whether this is a righteous cause or not, whether I am some crazy person – or whether the Lord truly works through individuals to get his purposes accomplished.

“I know that we are to stand now, and that we are to do these things now, or we will not have anything to pass on to our children.”

This kind of internecine bickering is a common feature of far-right organizing, especially in the antigovernment realm. For instance, while far-right mythology now enshrines the Bundy Ranch standoff as an epic moment of victory for their cause in which disparate groups came together, the reality is that the Bundy scene quickly dissolved into nasty factional quarrels, replete with drawn weapons and death threats.

So far, things haven’t devolved that far in Burns. However, no one has spread rumors (as they did at Bundy Ranch) of an imminent drone attack over their encampment, either – though Rhodes’ Oath Keepers website did post a warning that “military special op assets have been assigned for the standoff,” along with the advice to “keep women and children out of there.”