“Captain Moroni” and “Y’all-Qaeda”: Why the Armed Standoff in Oregon Is Being Mishandled—or, Rather, Not Handled at All

Back in spring of 2014, I wrote in this space about the armed confrontation in southern Nevada led by the extremist Mormon rancher Cliven Bundy.  He was in serious arrears for grazing fees on federal land and hit upon the idea that he didn’t have to pay them at all because his family had become owners of the land through “pre-emptive rights and beneficial use” (similar, ironically, to arguments used by radical leftists against absentee landlords in Latin American land-reform movements).  Federal agents arrived to confiscate his cattle in accordance with the law, but he and hundreds of armed supporters, including snipers and wielders of automatic weapons, stood their ground until finally the feds backed off.  Bundy never did have to pay those grazing fees.  I warned at the time that this would embolden future libertarian and anti-government militants.  And just last week I opined in my annual round-up article “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2016” that the rise of the Republican Party’s far-right extremist frontrunner for the presidential nomination, Donald Trump, would further inspire anti-government demonstrations and siege situations.  I was not pessimistic enough to think that I would be proven correct so soon, but events in Oregon this week have brought not just anti-government militancy, but the Bundy family in particular, back into the news.

Cliven Bundy in Nevada in 2014

On January 2nd, a group of armed militiamen led by three of Bundy’s fourteen (!) children took over a complex of administrative buildings on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon, near the town of Burns.  The events began with the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers, Dwight and Steve Hammond, charged with arson on federal lands that are administered by the United States federal government’s Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.).  The Hammonds and their supporters claimed to be managing invasive plants with the burns; others say they set fires to destroy evidence of their illegal poaching; but no one disputes that they broke the law, and, as laws go, arson is a serious one.  The charges against them came under anti-terrorism provisions as well, since the Hammonds had repeatedly threatened authorities with violence.

The Bundy family took up the Hammonds’ cause and publicized it among the vast network of local right-wing extremist militias that have proliferated over the past several decades in rural America, but especially whenever Democrats are in the White House.  Last month they organized a “Committee of Safety” (using language from the American Revolution), which they proclaimed as a “a governmental body established by the people in the absence of the ability of the existing government to provide for the needs and protection of civilized society.”

Some Three-Percenters with their flag (not a scene from this week’s standoff)

Ammon and Ryan Bundy, accompanied by members of the anti-government “Three-Percenters” militia (including Jon Ritzheimer, a celebrity in the militia world who rails against Muslims and had been kicked out of the Oath Keepers hate group in Arizona), took over several buildings on the wildlife preserve and set up roadblocks.  The occupiers of the buildings, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, claimed initially they numbered 150 people, later revised to 20 or 25, but that has not been confirmed.  There are possibly “no more than a dozen” of them, according to one reporter.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy

It is also unclear what role the Bundy family’s conservative Mormonism may play in the ideological stew of white supremacism, anarcho-libertarianism, firearms fetishism, and good-ol’-boy frontier mentality that informs this mini-movement.  One activist in the occupied building who spoke to the media identified himself only as “Captain Moroni, from Utah.”  Some observers think that this nom de guerre is a “dogwhistle” directed at Mormons who will recognize the reference to the figure of the same name in the Book of Mormon who rallied the Nephites (a fictional ancient tribe, supposedly a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel who migrated to the New World) against the corrupt King Amalickiah under a flag called the “Title of Liberty.”  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has already issued a statement saying that “this armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis.”  But what else would they say?  And even Cliven Bundy told media that the current occupation is “not exactly what I thought should happen.”

Captain Moroni with the Title of Liberty flag, from an L.D.S. illustration

The standoff is ongoing, and it is clearly about more than just the Hammonds (who began their sentence yesterday in a Los Angeles prison).  Ammon Bundy says the protesters will not leave until “the federal government ... give[s] up its unconstitutional presence in this county.”  They also point out that they are against the whole idea of federal wildlife refuges.  In the words of David M. Ward, sheriff of Harney County, where the standoff is occurring, “These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers, when in reality these men had alternative motives, to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.”

A scene from the 2014 Nevada standoff.  Note t-shirt with “baker’s apostrophe.”

In fact, “standoff” is hardly an appropriate word for the situation, since there is no visible physical response by law enforcement to the occupation whatsoever.  It is not clear who, if anyone, and at what level, is issuing “stand down” orders, but authorities are giving the occupied buildings a very wide berth, despite state police command centers far away in Burns and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s claims that they are on the case.

A special Oregon version of the Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flag
on display in Harney County this week

Given how heavily armed the occupiers are, this is quite astonishing, and more than one observer has pointed out that if, say, radical Muslims or Black nationalists were occupying those buildings, all of Harney County would be a glowing crater by now.  When the Black nationalist organization MOVE was involved in a similar standoff in Philadelphia in 1985, the city government bombed the neighborhood, destroying 65 homes and killing eleven people, including five children.  When anti-government members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) set up an armed encampment at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, President Richard Nixon sent in the army—the only time the U.S. military has been deployed against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory since the Civil War.  Some also wonder why the media is so hesitant to call the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (dubbed by social-media wags as “Y’all-Qaeda” or “Vanilla ISIS” and as “yee-haw-dists”) a terrorist group, and wonder if the term terrorist, as it is actually used, has more to do with people’s skin color or religion than with how armed and dangerous they are.

Philadelphia, 1985: what happens to armed protest encampments if you’re black

The White House said yesterday that President Barack Obama was monitoring the situation and that “this is a local law enforcement matter.”  In fact, that statement is not correct.  Crimes committed on federal property are a federal matter, but the federal government has decided not to enforce the law itself—just as it declined to do a year and half ago at Bundy’s ranch in Nevada.  As Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an organization which monitors militias and hate groups, put it, the Bundys in 2014 “were emboldened by their ability to run federal officials off at the point of a gun.  Now, a year and half later, there have been no prosecutions whatsoever.  Pointing a gun at a federal officer is a crime.”  Clearly, the Obama administration fears a confrontation that could spin out of control, like the ones at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1993 (three dead) and at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1994 (86 dead, including children).  Those events became recruiting bonanzas for the increasingly widespread and angry right-wing militia movement across the U.S.

The Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1994

Certainly, it is true that leaving the occupiers alone, not allowing anyone else in, and waiting for them to run out of food and surrender is among the more peaceful ways to end the conflict.  If nothing else, there aren’t even any police visible to shoot at.

Is that a Nazi salute, or is he just showing people where the port-a-potties are?

On the other hand, the message the authorities are sending militias is that they have more or less free rein to take over federal facilities without opposition.  Believe me, they will take us up that invitation.

[Thanks to Jeremy Appleton and Anna Reynolds for alerting me to sources consulted for this article.]

[You can read more about right-wing militias, the American Indian Movement, Black nationalists, and other sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Cliven Bundy Standoff May Be Harbinger of the Next Far-Right “Silly Season” (or Civil War?)

Bundy-ranch hangers-on pause to salute Old Glory

Far-right extremist political views and movements have lately come in the form of a series of what in United States politics are called “silly seasons.”  After President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 came, on the White House’s “We the People” petition web page, a wave of declarations of intent to secede from the Union—from all fifty states (plus the State of Jefferson) but mostly in the states of the Old Confederacy, Texas most notably.  Then, last year saw a series of movements in rural, conservative portions of “blue” (Democratic-dominated) or “swing” states, to create new states that would be mostly Republican.  The most notable were Colorado’s “North Colorado” or “New Colorado” movement, the Appalachian panhandle region of “Western Maryland,” and a “State of Jefferson” movement in northern California which is even now being prepared for voters in next month’s ballot in several rural counties.  Those have been, and are, mostly harmless and quixotic publicity stunts; they vent real grievances but have no hope of success given the U.S. Congress’s role as gatekeeper for admission to the union and the lack of any mechanism or successful precedent for full secession.

An impromptu lecture from Cliven Bundy

This year’s silly season may turn out to be a bit less silly.  And a lot of it has to do with Cliven Bundy, the rancher in southern Nevada who in March and April attracted an armed posse to help him “defend” “his” cattle from confiscation in the end game of a long-standing legal and financial dispute between his ranch and the federal Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.).

Ground zero of the latest Tea Party uprising, the Bundy standoff

More than three-quarters of Nevada is public land administered by either the B.L.M. or the U.S. Forest Service, both of which lease out their land for private use for fees.  Bundy was of the opinion that he didn’t have to pay his. As he put it, “My forefathers have been up and down the Virgin Valley here ever since 1877.  All these rights that I claim have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage and the water and the access and range improvements.”  Quite apart from the fact that this played fast and loose with the facts and that the Bundys have only been ranching there since 1954, the Bundy standoff—which the ranchers won, with the B.L.M. deciding not to come under fire by moving in and trying to confiscate Bundy’s cattle—represents a new wrinkle in the anti-government ideology that has been ramping up since the Clinton-era “state militias” of the 1990s and exploded after the election of the first Black president in 2008.

... plus lots and lots and lots of guns (and no “Negroes,” apparently)

Bundy’s opposition to the existence of public land and to the federal government in general is rather standard far-right-wing thinking.  But instead of merely wishing that public lands could all be sold off somehow, as is standard in Libertarian Party circles, Bundy takes the step of asserting that use equals ownership.  Though such an idea is rooted in the Enlightenment utilitarian philosophers whose thinking laid the groundwork for the American Revolution in the first place, it has other odd resonances as well. It uses some of the same arguments as radical socialist land-reform movements in Latin America, which argue that land should be distributed from its wealthy owners to the peasants that work it.  The Bundy standoff also seems dissonant with the standard far-right disdain for “welfare bums,” since that is a pretty good description of ranchers like Bundy throughout the West who are preferentially allowed to use public lands for scandalously low fees.

The Bureau of Land Management administers most of Nevada, and much of the West

Bundy also uses some of the precisely identical arguments as many American Indian activists and attorneys, to say nothing of indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world.  As Jacqueline Keeler (who is Dineh (Navajo) and Yankton Dakota Sioux) wrote recently in Indian Country Today and the Nation, “Bundy’s hullabaloo is particularly ironic considering that the Western Shoshone Nation’s claim to the land predates his own.  He has declared he will only recognize the original sovereignty of the state of Nevada, despite the fact that Nevada did not achieve statehood until 1864 and as such has no pre-existing claims to sovereign status.  Only the thirteen original colonies possessed sovereignty prior to the creation of the United States” (though one could argue for the formerly independent Texas, Hawaii, Vermont, and possibly California belonging to the club as well).  Quite notably, as Keeler points out, the Western Shoshone have never signed away their land, which they call Newe Sogobia, in a treaty and have refused all cash compensation for it.  Their territory includes most of Nevada, pieces of Idaho and Utah, and a generous swath of Southern California’s high deserts.  If any court anywhere were to rule dispassionately on the status of Western Shoshone lands, they would cease to be (or would cease to pretend being) part of the United States at all.  More precisely, the land Bundy ranches, which is in a rural eastern part of Clark County (county seat: Las Vegas), is the traditional territory of the Southern Paiute—who also, incidentally, were “pacified” without a proper treaty ceding territory.

Most of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons testing has been on the
unceded territory of the Western Shoshone nation.

This seems to signal a new phase in the emerging “sovereign citizen” and allied movements which declare the very illegitimacy of the federal government.  Further, the impulse is to halt the supposed distribution of wealth from white citizens, via the federal government, to nonwhites—hence the demonization of the word “entitlement.”  And, as though to prove the dictum that if you scratch a Tea Partier you find a racist, Bundy torpedoed his own popularity among the Fox News–watching public by a rambling statement before reporters in which he said, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” and described a housing project in Las Vegas, saying, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do.  They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do.  They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.  And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?  They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.  And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?  They didn’t get no more freedom.  They got less freedom.”  Suddenly Ron Paul and other Republicans were backpedalling like crazy to distance themselves from this new folk hero who apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that you don’t say stuff like that out loud.

Michigan’s separatist Hutaree Militia is one of hundreds such
right-wing armed extremist groups in the U.S.

There is no formal Nevada independence movement, but there is a rising movement of radical individualists who peddle a cocktail of capitalist, anarchist, and back-to-the-land ideas and feel that they have the right to take up arms against the federal government for any and all real or imagined abuses.  Many openly hope for “another Ruby Ridge,” referring to a 1992 federal standoff in Montana which galvanized the “militia” movement.  The far right may have thrown Bundy under the bus for public-relations reasons, but they have not given up their fight.  Some groups, such as local militias and a nonprofit called Oath Keepers who favor defying the federal government to protect the Constitution, have set up a near permanent encampment at the Bundy ranch—a sort of “Occupy” tent city for the Duck Dynasty crowd.  And they are always, always armed.

One possible emerging folk hero is one Ernie Wayne terTelgte, as he is legally known, who also goes by the monniker “Natural Man” or “Living Natural Man.”  Dressed in breeches and a three-cornered hat and armed with a musket, this self-described Montana mountain man has been making a personal crusade out of fishing without a license and doing other things to provoke arrest so that he can deliver impassioned Ayn Rand–style soliloquies in court, channeling Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, and Robert Nozick.  As he told one judge in a fishing case, “I was searching for something to put in my stomach as I am recognized to be allowed to do by universal law.  I am the living man and I have the right to forage for food when I am hungry.”  (Again, never mind the prior ownership by Native American tribes.)

Grizzly Adams meets John Quincy Adams:
“Living Natural Man” prepares for his perp walk.

Not only does Natural Man do things like getting jailed for contempt for not recognizing the authority of state courts, but he has also been involved in organizing “citizen grand juries” (spiffed-up vigilante mobs, really) which report only to county sheriffs, bypassing the entire judicial branch (so much for that part of the Constitution).  This takes a page from the Posse Comitatus, a white-supremacist-oriented militia movement of the 1970s and ’80s which refused to recognize any governmental authority above the county level.  Many “patriot militia” groups are hoping that terTelgte will provide the spark for the coming “civil war” in which “the people” will restore freedom and the Constitution.

... but at least his legal arguments are rock solid.
(Is there a tinfoil lining under that three-cornered hat?)

But this trend has gone beyond unhinged white mountain men quoting dead white philosophers.  In this blog I recently reported on the death last month of Verdiacee Washington-Turner Goston El-Bey, “Empress” of something called the “Washitaw Nation,” which melded the occultic Moorish Temple philosophy of the 1930s Black-nationalist movement with the tax-revolt tactics of the “sovereign citizens” movement.  Ostensibly African-American, Empress Verdiacee (her claimed “empire” was the entire Louisiana Purchase) subscribed to a strain of Afro-nationalist crackpot anthropology called the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which claims that an ancient migration of sub-Saharan Africans to the Americas makes African-Americans indigenous people as well—not subject to the Constitution or taxation.  Ever generous, she lifted the flaps of her big tent to admit any tax-hating Tea-Partier who could claim a drop or two of Cherokee blood.

An Afro-Amerind spin on the “sovereign citizen” movement:
the late Empress Verdiacee of the Washitaw Nation

Actual enrolled American Indians are catching the bug as well.  In a remote central Alaska Indian village, two law-enforcement officers who had appeared on the National Geographic reality-television show Alaska State Troopers were shot and killed in an apparent ambush May 1st as they were investigating a inter-family dispute over a couch.  The two men arrested in the killing, Nathaniel “Satch” Kangas and William Walsh, both of the Indian community of Tanana (pop.: 275), turn out to be members of a militia-style group called Athabascan Nation which does not recognize the authority of the State of Alaska and believes in taking up arms to make that point.  (The Dene, or Athabaskan, peoples are actually a broad linguistic grouping that includes most indigenous peoples of the Alaskan and western Canadian interior as well as far-flung groups such as the Navajo and Apache.)  They are on pretty good legal ground in questioning whether the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 really did have the authority to nullify millennia-old land-tenure systems, in many cases still operational ones. “We haven’t ever been conquered,” said Gary Albert, another Tanana member of the group, “and we ain’t going to feel like we’re conquered” But the arguments Athabascan Nation uses seem straight out of the playbook of the radical fringe of the Tea Party movement: Oath Keepers (see above), “nullification” advocates and “Tenthers” (those who read the 10th amendment to the Constitution as forbidding most of the federal government’s current functions), “organic constitutionalists” (who believe that everything since the Bill of Rights is an illegitimate modification of the federal structure), etc.  Calling them “brainwashed” “troublemakers,” the Tanana Tribal Council a week later formally banished Walsh, Kangas, and Kangas’s father, a ringleader of the group, from the community.

Taking away the dead troopers from Tanana:
this is not the way to win sympathy for the cause of indigenous sovereignty.

Dead-end petitions for independence or statehood are one thing.  But this new right-wing extremist “silly season” seems like it’s just waiting for the excuse to get serious.

[You can read more about separatist and new-nation movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Thanks to Tanya Ignacio and Jason Rosenbaum for alerting me to some of the information used for this article.