Cultures of Defiance and Resistance by Scott G. McNall

Author:Scott G. McNall [McNall, Scott G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781315295114
Google: kClKDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-29T03:34:03+00:00

The Bundy Ranch Standoff

Cliven Bundy (April 1946), a Mormon cattle rancher with a wife and 14 children, lives outside of Bunkerville, Nevada. The surrounding area gets little rain and the land is sparsely covered with sage brush, yucca, rabbit brush, Mormon tea (ephedra), cheat grass, and the occasional juniper. It is a barren land and easily damaged by grazing cattle. Bundy had been involved in a long-standing dispute with the BLM dating back to 1993 when he refused to pay for grazing his cattle on public land. Like others before him, he claimed that under Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the land was his to use. Federal court rulings in 1998 and 2013 prohibited him from continuing to graze his cattle and trespass on public land. By 2014, Bundy owed the government more than $1 million for unpaid grazing fees.

Bundy’s refusal to pay was loosely grounded in the ideology of the Sagebrush rebellion of the 1970s and the 1980s, when it was determined that the BLM needed to better manage public lands to protect the environment, cultural resources, and opportunities for recreation, rather than simply opening them up for logging, mining, or ranching. Proponents of the Sagebrush rebellion saw the federal government as grabbing “their” land and demanded that all public lands within the domain of a state be transferred to that state to be managed at the county level. Rural poverty, they claimed, was entirely the fault of the federal government. This idea, which is today pushed by conservative Western politicians and advocates of ranching, mining, and logging, is sometimes referred to as the “Wise Use” movement.61

On April 4, 2014, Shawna Cox, a friend of Cliven Bundy and his wife Carol, received a message on her answering machine from Cliven letting her know that the government was going to confiscate his cows and he needed her help. Cox was in the middle of a Tea Party meeting when she got Bundy’s message telling her he would do “whatever it took” to stop them. He needed her to bring friends and cowboys.62 The government was proposing to seize 1,100 head of his cattle and sell them at auction for the sum of $996,000. Bundy told Cox that he only had 500 head of cattle and maybe 100 new-born calves that had not yet been branded. Calls went out to friends, neighbors, and militia members, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), the Oath Keepers, and other patriot organizations to come to the ranch and bring guns.63

Bundy used his family’s blog (#BundyRanch) to post a YouTube video that showed a scuffle between Bundy’s sons and BLM officials who had arrived to supervise the roundup. Bundy proclaimed it the first step in a real war, “Range War begins tomorrow at Bundy Ranch.” It went viral on anti-government websites. Ryan Payne, 650 miles away in Anaconda, Montana, heard the call. Payne, a former soldier and a member of a small militia organization, West Mountain Rangers, got in touch with Bundy, promising he would bring militia and patriot groups from all over the country.

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