War in the West: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Right
Since 2009, there have been 17 shooting incidents between antigovernment extremists and law enforcement. In 2010, a father-and-son team of sovereign citizens, who believe that the law doesn’t apply to them, executed two Arkansas police officers during a traffic stop, and a California extremist shot and injured two state troopers. Another extremist in Texas tried to kill two sheriff’s deputies. Similar incidents have happened since, some ending in loss of life.
For those harboring deep hatred of the federal government, the BLM pullout was seen as a dramatic victory, one instance where the armed radicals of the right stared through their own gunsights at the gun barrels of law enforcement officials and won. Rather than being condemned, their actions garnered the support of numerous politicians, including the governor of Nevada and commentators like Fox News’ Sean Hannity — a truly repulsive spectacle. This pandering to the far right by both politicians and media figures ended in a hurry, however, when Bundy engaged in racist blather about “the Negro.” Racism was crossing a line, apparently, but the calls from the ranch for revolution and outright defiance of federal law enforcement seemed to be just fine with the Hannitys of the world.
The fallout from the BLM stand down is very troubling: an even more emboldened antigovernment movement. Just in the months since the Bundy “victory,” tense standoffs between the BLM and antigovernment activists have taken place across the West — in Idaho, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. The scariest incident happened in Utah, where two men pointed a handgun at a BLM worker in a marked federal vehicle while holding up a sign that said, “You need to die.”
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