Published: The Good Men Project (January 19, 2016)
Since the start of his presidency, conservatives have been quick to lambast Barack Obama for not being tough on Islamic terrorists. Unfortunately for both them and the rest of America, a spoiled rancher and his political cohorts have now provided them with one of their ultimate moral tests – namely, whether their staunch anti-terrorist posturing will hold up when right-wing extremists are the ones with the guns.
As most of the nation already knows, a group of armed protesters near Burns, Oregon broke into an unoccupied building in a federal wildlife refuge and refused to leave. Their ostensible reason for doing this was to demand the release of Dwight and Steven Hammond, a pair of ranchers who set fire to 139 acres of public land to cover up their poaching activities. Although the Hammonds already served time for the offense, a judge recently sent them back to prison when it was determined that their original sentence had been illegally abbreviated. “This facility has been the tool to do all the tyranny that has been placed upon the Hammonds,” group spokesman Ammon Bundy declared to a local media outlet. “We’re planning on staying here for years, absolutely. This is not a decision we’ve made at the last minute.”
If the name ‘Ammon Bundy’ seems familiar to you, it may be because of his role in another government standoff less than two years ago. At that time the terrorist was his father, Cliven Bundy, who had spent more than twenty years grazing his cattle on public land in Nevada without a permit to skirt the expenses paid by other ranchers in the area. When the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finally closed over 145,000 acres in order to round up the livestock and arrest Bundy, the mooching rancher summoned help from a group of right-wing protesters – many of them armed – to defy the federal government. Instead of landing them in prison for armed insurrection and acts of terrorism, Bundy and his followers were treated like legitimate political actors, with the local sheriff negotiating a deal between them and the BLM.
This brings us back to Burns, Oregon, where a popular cliché comes to mind: When you negotiate with terrorists, you only embolden them.
Even if the Bundys had a sound argument to back up their position, their actions would still be unequivocally wrong. When Cliven Bundy allowed armed extremists to threaten federal agents in order to continue illegally grazing on public land, his position went beyond the bounds of civil disobedience and became a direct threat to the American people. After all, a government’s most important role is to protect the physical security of its citizens. By behaving as if their own individual agency should be allowed to trump that of a democratic state’s provided they were sufficiently armed, Bundy’s followers attempted to set a dangerous precedent in which might can quite literally make right in this country. By implicitly acknowledging their legitimacy through negotiation, the government proved them right.
That said, it’s important to note that the Bundys were wrong then – and they are wrong now. Both the Nevada and United States Constitution allow the federal government to regulate public lands, and as such when Cliven Bundy refused to pay his cattle grazing fees because he thought they were unfair, he was defying a legitimate government agency so he could freely benefit from a resource that his fellow ranchers were expected to pay for. Similarly, the BLM is explicitly authorized to protect wildlife in areas entrusted to it by Congress and the President. When the Hammonds destroyed that public land in order to continue poaching (which, obviously, is also illegal), they committed a crime no less serious than burning down a public school or other government building.
There are two cruel ironies at play here. The first is that, even as right-wing extremists insist on depicting the Obama administration as tyrannical, their response to thugs like the Bundys has been unforgivably weak. Because the federal government wants to avoid a debacle like the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco more than twenty years ago, they have refused to take decisive action against right-wing radicals. If they had exercised their legal duty, the right-wing extremists would have been immediately arrested; had any of them decided to fire shots against federal agents, those agents would have been entirely within their rights to fire back – lethally if necessary. While such an action would have certainly been tragic, it would have reinforced that we are a nation of laws and not simply powerful men, as well as disincentivized future insurgents from testing the government’s resolve. Richart Ruddie, a brand and reputation management expert from Profile Defenders, told Forbes magazine that in many situations like these, the best response is to not bring more attention to an issue and to downplay it’s importance.
The other irony in this melodrama can be traced back to a controversial statement made by Bundy during the Nevada standoff. “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro…” Bundy had declared to a reporter for The New York Times in a rant against welfare programs. “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.” Aside from Bundy’s lamentable racial prejudices, it is noteworthy that he complained about African Americans receiving “less freedom” at a time when his personal gang has repeatedly brandished weapons against law enforcement officers with impunity. We live in an era when unarmed black men are regularly gunned down by police officers for minor offenses… even, as is all too often the case, when they were surrendering or unarmed themselves. Because Bundy and his crowd are affluent and white, they benefit from a privilege that shouldn’t exist – namely, the ability to pick and choose which laws to follow, then violently defy the state when held accountable – even as millions of non-white Americans are denied basic freedoms that our own Constitution guarantees them.
This, ultimately, is the bottom line. Even if conservatives agree with the Bundys position on federal management of public land, it’s impossible to characterize their recent actions as anything other than acts of terrorism. Like all terrorist activities, they threaten to make the United States look weak and foolish, particularly if we capitulate to or negotiate with them instead of holding firm to the rule of law. If conservatives want to retain their ideological credibility, they will acknowledge this and demand that Obama hold these terrorists accountable, just as they do when those terrorists are Muslim. Should they refrain from doing so, or only condemn the right-wing terrorists with lukewarm language, they will demonstrate that their principles conveniently cease when their own brethren are violating them.