[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. |
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.