Oregon standoff

[El]

Anyone following this?  It's kind of a bizarre thing, at least from the outside.  Also gets very, VERY different coverage from the right vs. the left.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oregon-militia-idUSKBN0UI1DC20160104

FBI seeks peaceful end to occupation at Oregon wildlife refuge
PRINCETON, Ore. | By Jim Urquhart

Federal law enforcement officials on Monday sought a peaceful end to the occupation of the headquarters of a U.S. wildlife refuge in Oregon launched over the weekend by a group of self-styled militiamen angry over the imminent imprisonment of two ranchers.

The occupation, which began on Saturday, was the latest skirmish over federal land management in the American West and reflected an anti-government stance held by some Americans.

On Monday morning, a group of about a half-dozen occupiers could be seen outside the facility, with some manning a watchtower and others standing around a vehicle they had used to block the road leading to the building. They chatted quietly among themselves as a large group of media looking on. None were visibly armed.

The occupation followed a protest march in Burns, a small city about 50 miles (80 km) north of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, over the imminent imprisonment of ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven Hammond.

The Hammonds were found guilty in 2012 of setting a series of fires including a 2001 blaze intended to cover up evidence of deer poaching that went on to burn 139 acres (56 hectares) of public lands, according to federal prosecutors.

They were initially sentenced to 12 months in prison, below the federal minimum for arson, but a U.S. district judge in October raised the sentences to five years.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to give details on plans by federal officials for dealing with the occupiers.

Law enforcement officials and the leader of the occupation, Ammon Bundy, declined to say how many people were occupying the refuge headquarters.

Bundy is the son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher whose family staged a 2014 armed protest against federal land management officials that ended with authorities backing down, citing safety concerns.

Ammon Bundy told ABC News on Monday that members of his group were armed.

"It's important that we stand and people know that we're serious," he said. "We understand that in order to truly express our First Amendment rights, we have to have our Second Amendment rights." The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the right to free speech, and the Second protects the right to bear arms.

In a statement, the FBI said it was seeking a "peaceful resolution to the situation," but offered few details.

"Due to safety considerations for both those inside the refuge as well as the law enforcement officers involved, we will not be releasing any specifics with regards to the law enforcement response," the FBI said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said late Sunday that all of its staff from the facility were safe and accounted for.

A lawyer for the Hammonds sought to distance his clients from Bundy and his armed band, saying they did not speak for the family.

Hammond and his son were convicted in 2012 of setting fires which inadvertently spread to public land. On Sunday evening, they traveled to Los Angeles to surrender to federal authorities, according to their lawyer, W. Alan Schroeder. They were to be sent back to prison after federal prosecutors won an appeal that resulted in their being re-sentenced to longer terms.

The occupation was part of a decades-old conflict between ranchers and the federal government over Washington's management of hundreds of thousands of acres of range land. Critics of the federal government say it often oversteps its authority and exercises arbitrary power over land use without sufficient accountability.

The Hammond ranch borders on the southern edge of the Oregon refuge, a bird sanctuary in the arid high desert in the eastern part of the state, about 305 miles (490 km) southeast of Portland.

The Bundy ranch standoff in 2014 drew hundreds of armed protesters after the Bureau of Land Management sought to seize Bundy's cattle because he refused to pay grazing fees. Federal agents backed down in the face of the large numbers of armed protesters and returned hundreds of cattle.

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, encompassing 292 square miles (75,630 hectares), was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt as a breeding ground for greater sandhill cranes and other native birds. The headquarters compound includes a visitor center, a museum and the refuge office.

[MLA]

It's somehow a Mormon thing.  That's the most interesting part to me.

[El]

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/01/04/3735830/bundy-mormonism/

News broke over the weekend that a group of armed militiamen commandeered a federal building housed in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, an action they said was meant to protest the conviction of two local ranchers found guilty of setting fire to federal land. Media outlets were quick to note the group’s leaders included Ammon Bundy, the son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who staged a similar standoff with the U.S. government in 2014 when he refused to remove his cattle from federal land. The family, it seemed, was rapidly becoming heroes of a national — and increasingly militant — anti-government moment.

But while the Nevada standoff and the armed Oregon occupation is often framed by pundits and politicians as a dispute over the role of government, the Bundy family also appears to be influenced by something else: their Mormon faith.

Granted, it would be a mistake to call the Bundy’s armed campaign against the government a “Mormon movement,” as some of their supporters do not share their faith and the Mormon church has condemned the Oregon occupation. Also, thousands of Mormons, or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), serve proudly in the U.S. military, not to mention the U.S. government.

But religion has undoubtedly played a key role in the lives and activism of the Bundys, as well as many of their passionate — and often armed — supporters. To fully understand those staring down government agents in Oregon, you first have to unpack their faith — and why their church rejects it.

The Bundy family claims a Mormon faith as inspiration for their cause…

As John Sepulvado pointed out over at OPD, Cliven Bundy repeatedly cited his Mormonism to justify his standoff with the United States government in 2014, insisting he has a right to graze cattle on federal land because his Mormon ancestors worked it long before the federal Bureau of Land Management was established.

“If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us?” Bundy said. “Could those people that stood (with me) without fear and went through that spiritual experience … have done that without the Lord being there? No, they couldn’t.”

Bundy even said that God inspired him to resist and “disarm” federal agents, arguing that failing to do so would result in civil war.
If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us?

“I have no idea what God wants done, but he did inspire me to have the sheriffs across the United States take away these weapons, disarm these bureaucracies, and he also gave me a little inspiration on what would happen if they didn’t do that,” Bundy said while speaking on the radio program KUER later that year. “It was indicated that ‘this is our chance, America, to straighten this problem up. If we don’t solve this problem this way, we will face these same guns in a civil war.'”

Bundy’s family reportedly fasted and prayed for the “spirit of their forefathers to be with them” during the 2014 incident, and Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, articulated a similar vision to explain his involvement in the recent takeover in Oregon. In a video posted on January 1, Ammon — whose name is the same as a famous figure from the Book of Mormon — explained that it was God who called him to leave his home and campaign on behalf of the Hammond family in Oregon.

“I clearly understood that the Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds,” Ammon said in between various references to prayer. He also reflected on God guiding him through the process: “It was exactly like it was happening at the Bundy ranch, when we were guided and directed as to what we were supposed to do…[Our plan is] wisdom in the Lord…And I ask you now to come participate in this wonderful thing in Harney County that the Lord is about to accomplish.”

Other Mormons have responded to the Bundys’ call to action. Several militia members who participated in the Nevada standoff quoted Mormon scripture and waved Mormon flags, for instance, and members of the Oregon occupation are already making references to Mormon religious figures.

…But the Mormon church doesn’t agree.

The LDS Church was mostly silent during the 2014 standoff, when Cliven Bundy told reporters that he “never had a problem with the bishop” regarding the dispute. On Monday, however, officials released a statement strongly condemning the Oregon occupation.

“While the disagreement occurring in Oregon about the use of federal lands is not a Church matter, Church leaders strongly condemn the armed seizure of the facility and are deeply troubled by the reports that those who have seized the facility suggest that they are doing so based on scriptural principles,” the statement read. “This armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis. We are privileged to live in a nation where conflicts with government or private groups can — and should — be settled using peaceful means, according to the laws of the land.”

Indeed, most members of the LDS church have a deep, abiding respect for the U.S. government — especially the Constitution, which the church sees as divinely inspired. In addition, the 12th article of faith for LDS members compels them to obey governmental authority, saying, “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”

The Bundys may be influenced by a distinctly Mormon style of Libertarianism

Regardless of the church’s current position, the Bundys’ rejection of the federal government mirrors that of many non-Mormons within the political right, but it might also originate from their faith. According to Matthew Bowman, a historian and author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith, the family’s political beliefs appear to reflect the theology of two prominent (and politically active) 20th-century Mormons: Ezra Taft Benson, former Secretary of Agriculture under president Dwight D. Eisenhower and the 13th president of the LDS Church, and Cleon Skousen, an influential Mormon political thinker and theologian. According to Bowman, both men forged a Libertarian approach to politics based on their religious beliefs.

“There is an important concept in Mormonism called free agency,” Bowman said. “Mormons don’t believe in original sin, so everyone is on this earth to choose how to live their lives, which [ to Benson and Skousen, was] with maximum possible individual liberty.”
The Bundys very closely link their Mormonism to conspiratorial Libertarianism.

“For Benson and Skousen, essentially we need to live in a Libertarian society for liberty to be effective,” he said, noting that Skousen is often lauded by conservative pundit and Mormon Glenn Beck, who called his book The 5,000 Year Leap “divinely inspired.”

The political concept is decidedly fringe within modern-day Mormonism, but Bowman acknowledged that “there remains a cadre of mormons who are very much followers of his idea.” He pointed to websites such as the “LDS Freedom Forum,” where Mormons vigorously debate right-wing Libertarian ideas on a number of message boards.

“A lot of people cheering for Bundy on that website right now,” he said, adding, “the Bundys very closely link their Mormonism to conspiratorial Libertarianism.”

Ammon Bundy appeared to envision this kind of Libertarian utopia when outlining his plan for the Oregon occupation.

“While we’re here, what we’re going to be doing is freeing these lands up, getting the ranchers back to ranching, getting the miners back to mining, getting the loggers back to logging, where they can do it under the protection of the people — and not be afraid of this tyranny that has been upon them,” Bundy said.

Bowman didn’t draw a direct connection between the family’s specific land-use ideas and Mormon theology, but noted that it was “a kind of radical localism” that “echoes of the Mormon settlement in the West.”

Militia members and Bundy supporters are pointing to Mormon scripture to justify their actions
Ammon Bundy speaks at a rally on the anniversary of Cliven Bundy's stand against the federal government. The flag that waves beside him is the "Title of Liberty," a Mormon flag.

Ammon Bundy speaks at a rally on the anniversary of Cliven Bundy’s stand against the federal government. The flag that waves beside him is the “Title of Liberty,” a Mormon flag.

CREDIT: AP Photo/John Locher

As other writers have already pointed out, one of the gun-toting militants holed up on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is refusing to identify himself as anything other than “Captain Moroni.” The cryptic name is a direct reference to Captain Moroni from the Book of Mormon, an important religious figure who is remembered for resisting a tyrannical government. According to scripture, Moroni rose to power when a group of dissenters tried to establish their leader Amalickiah as king over the captain’s people, the Nephites. Moroni became so outraged that he tore off his clothing, wrote a slogan on it, and fashioned it into a flag, using it to rally his army and drive out Amalickiah’s forces.

“And it came to pass that [Moroni] rent his coat; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it—In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children—and he fastened it upon the end of a pole,” the scripture reads.

Moroni killed any dissenters who did not flee, and his banner, now known as the “Title of Liberty,” was raised over every Nephite tower. Similarly, flags bearing Moroni’s slogan “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children” were waved by Bundy supporters and militia members at a rally last summer in Nevada, when the family organized an event to mark the anniversary of the rancher’s refusal to comply with federal laws.

“Captain Moroni is the prototypical Mormon defender for freedom of worship and freedom of liberty,” Bowman said.

Although the LDS church believes the U.S. Constitution is divinely inspired, there is a long history of armed, anti-government Mormon militias

Bundy supporters haven’t specifically mentioned Mormonism’s previous military entanglements, but the group’s history is still rife with examples of the faithful resisting rulers — specifically the United States government. This isn’t to say Mormons were ever apolitical: The religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, ran an unsuccessful campaign for president that ended abruptly when he was attacked and killed by a mob that disagreed with his political beliefs. Smith’s chief campaigner and successor, Brigham Young, ultimately lead most of the remaining Mormons to modern-day Utah, where he was appointed the first governor of what was then a U.S. territory.
It’s possible that higher-level authorities could get involved at some point, but that would be the exception instead of the rule.

But relations with the U.S. government and the religious settlers quickly deteriorated, resulting in the Utah War, sometimes called the “Mormon War.” Stretching from 1857-1858, the conflict began when the U.S. government sent an expedition of federal troops to the region, which the Mormon population — having endured oppression and violence before moving to Utah — saw as an attempt to annihilate their people. In response, the Mormons mustered an armed militia to harass the government soldiers, and while there were no formal battles, there wars saw several skirmishes between the two forces. The conflict also set the stage for the infamous Mountain Meadows massacre, when Mormon-affiliated militiamen murdered 120 California-bound settlers over several days as they crossed through northern Utah.

Ultimately, though, the Bundy’s faith may just be the Mormon version of a mindset common throughout the American West — regardless of faith tradition.

“We can talk about the Bundys as Mormon, but their beliefs are very Western as well — it’s not a mistake that you see this happening in the West,” Bowman said. “There is a pervasive Libertarianism in the region.”

[El]

This is also one of those weird things where, as a bleeding-heart liberal, I kinda wish the liberal media coverage was a bit less... extreme, I guess?  I'm seeing, for example, a lot of comparisons to this vs. black lives matter protests, media coverage of them, police response to them, etc.  Except I am not seeing much difference in media coverage (that may just be what I'm seeing in my own little echo chamber, though).  And while the police responses to black lives matter protests are generally pretty fucked up and shouldn't be the way they are, those protests aren't usually happening out in the middle of nowhere, so the comparison doesn't seem as direct as press coverage is making it out to be.  It honestly seems like a viable response with these guys (based on what I understand of the Oregon situation) to, as long as they're not hurting anyone (and the situation may or may not escalate on its own), just let them sit there until they get hungry and bored, which thus far seems to be about what's being done.

Maybe I'm missing something?

[El]

All that said- I just saw this, it made me lol:

[MLA]

This is also one of those weird things where, as a bleeding-heart liberal, I kinda wish the liberal media coverage was a bit less... extreme, I guess?  I'm seeing, for example, a lot of comparisons to this vs. black lives matter protests, media coverage of them, police response to them, etc.  Except I am not seeing much difference in media coverage (that may just be what I'm seeing in my own little echo chamber, though).  And while the police responses to black lives matter protests are generally pretty fucked up and shouldn't be the way they are, those protests aren't usually happening out in the middle of nowhere, so the comparison doesn't seem as direct as press coverage is making it out to be.  It honestly seems like a viable response with these guys (based on what I understand of the Oregon situation) to, as long as they're not hurting anyone (and the situation may or may not escalate on its own), just let them sit there until they get hungry and bored, which thus far seems to be about what's being done.

Maybe I'm missing something?

What the media is missing is that the feds are handling this while local police handle Black Lives Matter protests.  This, to a large extent, explains away why they haven't all been shot already.

[El]

This is also one of those weird things where, as a bleeding-heart liberal, I kinda wish the liberal media coverage was a bit less... extreme, I guess?  I'm seeing, for example, a lot of comparisons to this vs. black lives matter protests, media coverage of them, police response to them, etc.  Except I am not seeing much difference in media coverage (that may just be what I'm seeing in my own little echo chamber, though).  And while the police responses to black lives matter protests are generally pretty fucked up and shouldn't be the way they are, those protests aren't usually happening out in the middle of nowhere, so the comparison doesn't seem as direct as press coverage is making it out to be.  It honestly seems like a viable response with these guys (based on what I understand of the Oregon situation) to, as long as they're not hurting anyone (and the situation may or may not escalate on its own), just let them sit there until they get hungry and bored, which thus far seems to be about what's being done.

Maybe I'm missing something?

What the media is missing is that the feds are handling this while local police handle Black Lives Matter protests.  This, to a large extent, explains away why they haven't all been shot already.

I hadn't thought of that.

[El]

OK, finally found an article I feel does a decent job of handling this issue sanely:

The activists who began occupying government buildings in the Oregon wilderness over the weekend say that they’re protesting how federal authorities treated rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and Steven Hammond, his middle-aged son.

Federal authorities charged the Hammonds with arson after they set a series of fires that spread to public land. A 2001 fire accidentally burned beyond their property line, according to The New York Times. The Department of Justice says it was set to cover up an illegal deer hunt, while the men say that they were burning away an invasive plant species on their land. Years later in 2006, “a burn ban was in effect while firefighters battled blazes started by a lightning storm on a hot day in August,” the newspaper reported. “Steven Hammond had started a ‘back burn’ to prevent the blaze from destroying the family’s winter feed for its cattle.” It was reported by Bureau of Land Management firefighters in the area, and the Justice Department notes that they “took steps to ensure their safety.” It burned about an acre of public land, causing less than $1,000 in damage. Charged with a number of crimes related to arson, the father was convicted of just one count of arson while the son was convicted of two counts for the wilderness fires. The government used an anti-terrorism statute to secure its convictions.
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The statute imposed a mandatory minimum sentence: 5 years imprisonment under the Orwellian-sounding Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan felt that five-year sentences were “grossly disproportionate” and would “shock his conscience,” given the context of the case. He sentenced the older man to three months in federal prison and the son to concurrent one-year sentences. Those punishments inspired no radical activism.

What happened next, did. The Department of Justice appealed the sentences, won in the 9th Circuit, and is forcing the men to return to prison after they thought they had done their time. Both will now serve the mandatory-minimum sentence. 

* * *

When HBO’s John Oliver broadcasts a polemical monologue, its subject is invariably something that America’s Blue Tribe—Americans whose place on the cultural and ideological left forms a core part of their identity—regards as idiotic, evil, or both. Last Week Tonight helps its audience indulge in collective outrage.

Earlier this year, Oliver skewered mandatory minimums. The laws “require judges to punish certain crimes with a minimum number of years in prison, regardless of context,” he explained, “which is a little strange, because context is important.” He added that “they’re partly responsible for the explosion of our prison population,” noting that many judges oppose them because they hand power over sentencing to prosecutors, who frequently “use the threat of long mandatory minimums to convince defendants to take a plea bargain or cooperate by giving information.”

The segment even highlighted the sort of people given mandatory minimums that Last Week Tonight’s target demographic was likely to find sympathetic: men and women, some with children, given long sentences in a drug war the blue tribe regards as unjust and pointless. Most every major media outlet on the center-left has run some version of that story over the last several years, and liberals and progressives eagerly shared Oliver’s takedown and its predecessors on social media.

I loved the segment.

Mandatory minimums really are objectionable as a matter of principle, as a policy that has resulted in countless individual injustices, and as a significant driver of over-incarceration.

In theory, those on the left who care about vanquishing mandatory minimums could have used the news story about the Hammonds to broaden awareness and opposition to the practice among members of the Red Tribe. Libertarian intellectuals oppose mandatory minimums. Why not the populist right, too? Some folks in rural areas who’ve never known about the laws, or think that they only affect people in cities, might change their minds if they were to find out that what happened to the Hammonds is routine; that many Americans have suffered far more egregious sentences; and that mandatory minimums affect all sorts of defendants.

Yes, the Oregon protestors have a larger agenda about the management of federal lands in the West and the degree to which they ought to be under local control.

Still, in their opposition to mandatory minimums, they share common ground with the left.

As Jacob Sullum explains, the judge who tried to impose lesser sentences on the Hammonds chose punishments “within the ranges recommended by federal sentencing guidelines that would have applied but for the statutory minimum.” In doing so, he argued that mandatory-minimum laws run afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, legal reasoning that surely appeals to at least some leftist opponents of mandatory minimums.

Sullum helpfully summarizes the 9th Circuit’s logic in imposing the five-year sentence on the Hammonds, which many longtime opponents of mandatory minimums will find perverse:

    In rejecting Hogan's conclusion that the mandatory minimum was unconstitutional as applied to the Hammonds, the 9th Circuit noted that the Supreme Court "has upheld far tougher sentences for less serious or, at the very least, comparable offenses." The examples it cited included "a sentence of fifty years to life under California's three-strikes law for stealing nine videotapes," "a sentence of twenty-five years to life under California's three-strikes law for the theft of three golf clubs," "a forty-year sentence for possession of nine ounces of marijuana with the intent to distribute," and "a life sentence under Texas's recidivist statute for obtaining $120.75 by false pretenses." If those penalties did not qualify as "grossly disproportionate," the appeals court reasoned, five years for accidentally setting fire to federal land cannot possibly exceed the limits imposed by the Eighth Amendment.

    In other words, since even worse miscarriages of justice have passed constitutional muster, this one must be OK too. Given the binding authority of the Supreme Court's precedents, the 9th Circuit's legal reasoning is hard to fault. But it highlights the gap between what is legal and what is right, a gap that occasionally inspires judges to commit random acts of fairness.

This might have served as a rallying cry for opponents of mass incarceration.

“While federal management of public lands is legitimate and occupying a federal facility is unjustified,” a left-leaning publication might have editorialized, “it’s easy to see why the Hammond case struck some observers as unjust. The notion that judges are there to exercise discretion based on context––that it’s odious to force them to give severe sentences even when they judge them to be ‘grossly disproportionate’––is exactly what criminal-justice reformers have long argued. There have been bipartisan reforms on this issue before. Let’s abolish all mandatory minimums for good through the civic process, not counterproductive armed protests.”

Instead, many left-leaning commentators are savaging the protestors in ways that can’t be exaggerated. Take David Atkins, who labels them terrorists in the Washington Monthly:

    I don’t want to dwell too much on the rationales and motivations for these domestic terrorists any more than I would for the people who fight for ISIS or Al Qaeda. It’s always the same thing: a group of armed, angry men believe that the Big Bad Western Government is infringing on their right to do whatever it is they very well please—whether it’s to the environment, or to minorities, women, people of different religious groups, etc. Undereducated, armed angry men are often upset at Western governments for upsetting their private power apple carts because in their small, solipsistic worlds they’re very used to being lords of their manors and local enforcers of bigoted frontier justice. That’s as true of Afghan militants in the Taliban as it is of rural Montana militiamen. The only difference is in the trappings, the external presence of the rule of law and the degree of violence involved.

The blogger Scott Alexander once argued with more detail than I can quote here that “if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it’s the Red Tribe.”

The Washington Monthly article continues:

    What’s more interesting to focus on is the response to the incident so far. As with ISIS, the Bundy clowns are actively seeking a confrontation with the big bad wolf of Big Western Government. They believe that an active confrontation will spark a movement that will lead to the overthrow of Big Brother. So far, especially after the incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco, American leaders have been disinclined to give those opportunities to the domestic militiaman terrorists. Cliven Bundy and his miscreants got away with a wide range of crimes due to the forbearance of federal officials.

    But the problem with taking that hands-off approach is that the treatment of left-leaning protesters is far different. Occupiers and Black Lives Matter protesters aren’t met with hand wringing and gentle admonishments. They’re met with batons and tear gas. If Black Lives Matter or Occupy protesters started arming themselves and taking over federal buildings, you can guarantee that police would start using live ammunition and people would die. So on the one hand it’s understandable that federal officials would not want to make martyrs of the right-wing domestic terrorists who are actively seeking to engage in a confrontation and make themselves appear to be downtrodden victims of the federal beast. But on the other hand, it’s infuriating that they receive special kid glove treatment that would not be afforded to minority and liberal activists.

The article concludes, “As much as restraint is the better part of valor when dealing with entitled conservative crazies, principles of basic justice and fair play also need to apply. What’s good for one type of terrorist must also be good for another.” That’s a call for the use of violence against specific Americans, framed as a demand for equality! It is bizarre that the author name-checks Ruby Ridge and Waco as he argues that white-male extremists in the Red Tribe get “kid glove” treatment––and seems stranger still with new information trickling out each month about how many bikers in last year’s Waco shootout were hit by police bullets.

Blacks and Hispanics do suffer disproportionately from police violence. I’ve written repeatedly about the egregiously unfair treatment of some Occupy protestors and the scandalously militarized response to street protests in Ferguson. But there are lots of examples of Occupy protestors who were met with no more than “hand wringing and gentle admonishments” even as they violated the law. Lots of Black Lives Matter protestors have engaged in civil disobedience without arrest.

I don’t know if there’s a double standard that causes Team Blue’s activists to be treated more harshly by authorities, but if there is, it would be no excuse for calling on police to use live ammunition more often rather than demanding that they evenhandedly exercise more restraint.  “Self-proclaimed people of conscience interested in reducing and even eliminating excessive state violence should not make exceptions just because government violence might satiate their sectarian desires or partisan agendas,” Ed Krayewski persuasively argues. “...those exceptions easily become the rule by being exploited by other sectarians and partisans.”

Alas, the Washington Monthly author is hardly alone. “The Oregon men are domestic terrorists,” a CNN opinion article declares. On Twitter, folks on the left have dubbed the Oregon activists “Vanilla ISIS,” “Y’all Qaeda,” and “YokelHaram.” 

Criticizing the armed occupiers is perfectly fine. They are acting irresponsibly, illegitimately, and based on some bad premises. They should abandon their counterproductive, doomed protest right now before they do harm to innocents or themselves, and instead pursue their grievances through civic persuasion. But all they’ve done so far is occupy a federal building in the wilderness when no one was using it. It is at least possible that in doing so they are calling attention to real misbehavior by the federal government. No tribe that customarily extols civil disobedience should first condemn them without taking the time to investigate the accuracy of their claims about that misbehavior.

And likening them to mass murderers amounts to irresponsible, indefensible demonization. It is unimaginable, save for the fact that the targets of state violence in this case are rural white men from the Red Tribe.

Thankfully, more responsible voices on the left are meeting tribal illogic and demonization with reason. “I understand the gut satisfaction of fantasizing about a Bonnie & Clyde style shootout that leaves the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge soaked in terrorist blood, but that's really not what any of us should want,” Kevin Drum writes at Mother Jones. “These guys aren't terrorists, anyway. They're just as misguided as real terrorists, but they haven't taken anyone hostage or threatened to blow up an airplane.” I don’t actually understand why a shootout is appealing even as fantasy, or how someone can be “just as misguided as real terrorists” without committing any acts of terrorism, but I’ll take it.

“What we must not do,” Margaret Corvid writes at Jacobin, “is call for the police to move in with the tear gas and rubber bullets of Ferguson and Baltimore, or the live rounds of MOVE or Wounded Knee, because equal injustice is not justice done.”

Quite so.

We’d all do better to focus on forging red-blue alliances to address injustices of common concern rather than behaving as if it is either useful or morally righteous to denounce, demonize, and dehumanize the members of opposing ideological tribes.

Proponents of using civil disobedience to draw attention to government injustices ought not conflate those who engage in that tactic with ISIS, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban. Opponents of mandatory-minimum sentences should oppose them in this case, too, even though there are far more egregious cases to highlight. Opponents of over-incarceration should look askance at sending an elderly man to prison for five years––two years more than Mike Tyson served for rape––even if he did set a fire to hide an illegal deer hunt. And opponents of overly broad domestic-terrorism laws should object to how the ranchers were prosecuted under them for non-terroristic acts. Why is cooperating on those concerns so hard for so many who share them?

[Al Swearegen]

OK, finally found an article I feel does a decent job of handling this issue sanely:

The activists who began occupying government buildings in the Oregon wilderness over the weekend say that they’re protesting how federal authorities treated rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and Steven Hammond, his middle-aged son.

Federal authorities charged the Hammonds with arson after they set a series of fires that spread to public land. A 2001 fire accidentally burned beyond their property line, according to The New York Times. The Department of Justice says it was set to cover up an illegal deer hunt, while the men say that they were burning away an invasive plant species on their land. Years later in 2006, “a burn ban was in effect while firefighters battled blazes started by a lightning storm on a hot day in August,” the newspaper reported. “Steven Hammond had started a ‘back burn’ to prevent the blaze from destroying the family’s winter feed for its cattle.” It was reported by Bureau of Land Management firefighters in the area, and the Justice Department notes that they “took steps to ensure their safety.” It burned about an acre of public land, causing less than $1,000 in damage. Charged with a number of crimes related to arson, the father was convicted of just one count of arson while the son was convicted of two counts for the wilderness fires. The government used an anti-terrorism statute to secure its convictions.
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Bernie Sanders’ Plan to Make Banking Affordable for Average Americans

The statute imposed a mandatory minimum sentence: 5 years imprisonment under the Orwellian-sounding Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan felt that five-year sentences were “grossly disproportionate” and would “shock his conscience,” given the context of the case. He sentenced the older man to three months in federal prison and the son to concurrent one-year sentences. Those punishments inspired no radical activism.

What happened next, did. The Department of Justice appealed the sentences, won in the 9th Circuit, and is forcing the men to return to prison after they thought they had done their time. Both will now serve the mandatory-minimum sentence. 

* * *

When HBO’s John Oliver broadcasts a polemical monologue, its subject is invariably something that America’s Blue Tribe—Americans whose place on the cultural and ideological left forms a core part of their identity—regards as idiotic, evil, or both. Last Week Tonight helps its audience indulge in collective outrage.

Earlier this year, Oliver skewered mandatory minimums. The laws “require judges to punish certain crimes with a minimum number of years in prison, regardless of context,” he explained, “which is a little strange, because context is important.” He added that “they’re partly responsible for the explosion of our prison population,” noting that many judges oppose them because they hand power over sentencing to prosecutors, who frequently “use the threat of long mandatory minimums to convince defendants to take a plea bargain or cooperate by giving information.”

The segment even highlighted the sort of people given mandatory minimums that Last Week Tonight’s target demographic was likely to find sympathetic: men and women, some with children, given long sentences in a drug war the blue tribe regards as unjust and pointless. Most every major media outlet on the center-left has run some version of that story over the last several years, and liberals and progressives eagerly shared Oliver’s takedown and its predecessors on social media.

I loved the segment.

Mandatory minimums really are objectionable as a matter of principle, as a policy that has resulted in countless individual injustices, and as a significant driver of over-incarceration.

In theory, those on the left who care about vanquishing mandatory minimums could have used the news story about the Hammonds to broaden awareness and opposition to the practice among members of the Red Tribe. Libertarian intellectuals oppose mandatory minimums. Why not the populist right, too? Some folks in rural areas who’ve never known about the laws, or think that they only affect people in cities, might change their minds if they were to find out that what happened to the Hammonds is routine; that many Americans have suffered far more egregious sentences; and that mandatory minimums affect all sorts of defendants.

Yes, the Oregon protestors have a larger agenda about the management of federal lands in the West and the degree to which they ought to be under local control.

Still, in their opposition to mandatory minimums, they share common ground with the left.

As Jacob Sullum explains, the judge who tried to impose lesser sentences on the Hammonds chose punishments “within the ranges recommended by federal sentencing guidelines that would have applied but for the statutory minimum.” In doing so, he argued that mandatory-minimum laws run afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, legal reasoning that surely appeals to at least some leftist opponents of mandatory minimums.

Sullum helpfully summarizes the 9th Circuit’s logic in imposing the five-year sentence on the Hammonds, which many longtime opponents of mandatory minimums will find perverse:

    In rejecting Hogan's conclusion that the mandatory minimum was unconstitutional as applied to the Hammonds, the 9th Circuit noted that the Supreme Court "has upheld far tougher sentences for less serious or, at the very least, comparable offenses." The examples it cited included "a sentence of fifty years to life under California's three-strikes law for stealing nine videotapes," "a sentence of twenty-five years to life under California's three-strikes law for the theft of three golf clubs," "a forty-year sentence for possession of nine ounces of marijuana with the intent to distribute," and "a life sentence under Texas's recidivist statute for obtaining $120.75 by false pretenses." If those penalties did not qualify as "grossly disproportionate," the appeals court reasoned, five years for accidentally setting fire to federal land cannot possibly exceed the limits imposed by the Eighth Amendment.

    In other words, since even worse miscarriages of justice have passed constitutional muster, this one must be OK too. Given the binding authority of the Supreme Court's precedents, the 9th Circuit's legal reasoning is hard to fault. But it highlights the gap between what is legal and what is right, a gap that occasionally inspires judges to commit random acts of fairness.

This might have served as a rallying cry for opponents of mass incarceration.

“While federal management of public lands is legitimate and occupying a federal facility is unjustified,” a left-leaning publication might have editorialized, “it’s easy to see why the Hammond case struck some observers as unjust. The notion that judges are there to exercise discretion based on context––that it’s odious to force them to give severe sentences even when they judge them to be ‘grossly disproportionate’––is exactly what criminal-justice reformers have long argued. There have been bipartisan reforms on this issue before. Let’s abolish all mandatory minimums for good through the civic process, not counterproductive armed protests.”

Instead, many left-leaning commentators are savaging the protestors in ways that can’t be exaggerated. Take David Atkins, who labels them terrorists in the Washington Monthly:

    I don’t want to dwell too much on the rationales and motivations for these domestic terrorists any more than I would for the people who fight for ISIS or Al Qaeda. It’s always the same thing: a group of armed, angry men believe that the Big Bad Western Government is infringing on their right to do whatever it is they very well please—whether it’s to the environment, or to minorities, women, people of different religious groups, etc. Undereducated, armed angry men are often upset at Western governments for upsetting their private power apple carts because in their small, solipsistic worlds they’re very used to being lords of their manors and local enforcers of bigoted frontier justice. That’s as true of Afghan militants in the Taliban as it is of rural Montana militiamen. The only difference is in the trappings, the external presence of the rule of law and the degree of violence involved.

The blogger Scott Alexander once argued with more detail than I can quote here that “if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it’s the Red Tribe.”

The Washington Monthly article continues:

    What’s more interesting to focus on is the response to the incident so far. As with ISIS, the Bundy clowns are actively seeking a confrontation with the big bad wolf of Big Western Government. They believe that an active confrontation will spark a movement that will lead to the overthrow of Big Brother. So far, especially after the incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco, American leaders have been disinclined to give those opportunities to the domestic militiaman terrorists. Cliven Bundy and his miscreants got away with a wide range of crimes due to the forbearance of federal officials.

    But the problem with taking that hands-off approach is that the treatment of left-leaning protesters is far different. Occupiers and Black Lives Matter protesters aren’t met with hand wringing and gentle admonishments. They’re met with batons and tear gas. If Black Lives Matter or Occupy protesters started arming themselves and taking over federal buildings, you can guarantee that police would start using live ammunition and people would die. So on the one hand it’s understandable that federal officials would not want to make martyrs of the right-wing domestic terrorists who are actively seeking to engage in a confrontation and make themselves appear to be downtrodden victims of the federal beast. But on the other hand, it’s infuriating that they receive special kid glove treatment that would not be afforded to minority and liberal activists.

The article concludes, “As much as restraint is the better part of valor when dealing with entitled conservative crazies, principles of basic justice and fair play also need to apply. What’s good for one type of terrorist must also be good for another.” That’s a call for the use of violence against specific Americans, framed as a demand for equality! It is bizarre that the author name-checks Ruby Ridge and Waco as he argues that white-male extremists in the Red Tribe get “kid glove” treatment––and seems stranger still with new information trickling out each month about how many bikers in last year’s Waco shootout were hit by police bullets.

Blacks and Hispanics do suffer disproportionately from police violence. I’ve written repeatedly about the egregiously unfair treatment of some Occupy protestors and the scandalously militarized response to street protests in Ferguson. But there are lots of examples of Occupy protestors who were met with no more than “hand wringing and gentle admonishments” even as they violated the law. Lots of Black Lives Matter protestors have engaged in civil disobedience without arrest.

I don’t know if there’s a double standard that causes Team Blue’s activists to be treated more harshly by authorities, but if there is, it would be no excuse for calling on police to use live ammunition more often rather than demanding that they evenhandedly exercise more restraint.  “Self-proclaimed people of conscience interested in reducing and even eliminating excessive state violence should not make exceptions just because government violence might satiate their sectarian desires or partisan agendas,” Ed Krayewski persuasively argues. “...those exceptions easily become the rule by being exploited by other sectarians and partisans.”

Alas, the Washington Monthly author is hardly alone. “The Oregon men are domestic terrorists,” a CNN opinion article declares. On Twitter, folks on the left have dubbed the Oregon activists “Vanilla ISIS,” “Y’all Qaeda,” and “YokelHaram.” 

Criticizing the armed occupiers is perfectly fine. They are acting irresponsibly, illegitimately, and based on some bad premises. They should abandon their counterproductive, doomed protest right now before they do harm to innocents or themselves, and instead pursue their grievances through civic persuasion. But all they’ve done so far is occupy a federal building in the wilderness when no one was using it. It is at least possible that in doing so they are calling attention to real misbehavior by the federal government. No tribe that customarily extols civil disobedience should first condemn them without taking the time to investigate the accuracy of their claims about that misbehavior.

And likening them to mass murderers amounts to irresponsible, indefensible demonization. It is unimaginable, save for the fact that the targets of state violence in this case are rural white men from the Red Tribe.

Thankfully, more responsible voices on the left are meeting tribal illogic and demonization with reason. “I understand the gut satisfaction of fantasizing about a Bonnie & Clyde style shootout that leaves the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge soaked in terrorist blood, but that's really not what any of us should want,” Kevin Drum writes at Mother Jones. “These guys aren't terrorists, anyway. They're just as misguided as real terrorists, but they haven't taken anyone hostage or threatened to blow up an airplane.” I don’t actually understand why a shootout is appealing even as fantasy, or how someone can be “just as misguided as real terrorists” without committing any acts of terrorism, but I’ll take it.

“What we must not do,” Margaret Corvid writes at Jacobin, “is call for the police to move in with the tear gas and rubber bullets of Ferguson and Baltimore, or the live rounds of MOVE or Wounded Knee, because equal injustice is not justice done.”

Quite so.

We’d all do better to focus on forging red-blue alliances to address injustices of common concern rather than behaving as if it is either useful or morally righteous to denounce, demonize, and dehumanize the members of opposing ideological tribes.

Proponents of using civil disobedience to draw attention to government injustices ought not conflate those who engage in that tactic with ISIS, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban. Opponents of mandatory-minimum sentences should oppose them in this case, too, even though there are far more egregious cases to highlight. Opponents of over-incarceration should look askance at sending an elderly man to prison for five years––two years more than Mike Tyson served for rape––even if he did set a fire to hide an illegal deer hunt. And opponents of overly broad domestic-terrorism laws should object to how the ranchers were prosecuted under them for non-terroristic acts. Why is cooperating on those concerns so hard for so many who share them?

So...Federal cops have been hassling and intimidating Ranchers with impunity and the straw that broke the camels back was this incident.

Now the armed protest.

[El]

It's the fact that it's an armed protest (and while I'm not sure terrorism is the right word for it, I do feel like "armed protest" is a bit euphemistic) that makes all the difference, but I am still exasperated that so much of the coverage I'm seeing is basically just making fun of them as idiot rednecks.  Throwing around more hateful stereotypes instead of looking at the problem isn't helpful, it's just ragegasming.

Again, this is one of those things where I cringe to see the way the media on "my side" of an argument goes about covering it.  :/

[Al Swearegen]

Yeah. I must admit I considered myself Left and Liberal. I would watch Youtube of Bill Maher and Jon Steward and Young Turks and Rachel Maddow. Fox News was batshit crazy.
The world made sense. The crazies were easy to see and the dishonest agenda pushers were easy to pick.
Then the "Progressives" (or "Regressives" depending on who you ask)  became more and more vocal. The crazy views no longer came from the right. The crazy ideologues and the PC police, tone policing and identity politics had swung to the left.
I say stay in the middle and mock both sides.

This is the PERFECT example of the difference between Progressive and Liberal politics and viewpoints. The Liberal professor and the Progressive Student. Both Identify with the Left and the reason Progressives have and do get give a voice is because they do it under the Leftist flag and with the endorsement and encouragement of Liberals who are gullible to think they fight for the same things. As this Professor finds out, they do not and for all HE is reasonable - they aren't, for all he is for liberty and freedom - they are not, and for all that Academia has coddled and protected these Progressives, they are NOT allies.



The right was a laughing stock for a long time and now it is the Left's turn.

[Parts]

Yeah. I must admit I considered myself Left and Liberal. I would watch Youtube of Bill Maher and Jon Steward and Young Turks and Rachel Maddow. Fox News was batshit crazy.
The world made sense. The crazies were easy to see and the dishonest agenda pushers were easy to pick.
Then the "Progressives" (or "Regressives" depending on who you ask)  became more and more vocal. The crazy views no longer came from the right. The crazy ideologues and the PC police, tone policing and identity politics had swung to the left.
I say stay in the middle and mock both sides.

This is the PERFECT example of the difference between Progressive and Liberal politics and viewpoints. The Liberal professor and the Progressive Student. Both Identify with the Left and the reason Progressives have and do get give a voice is because they do it under the Leftist flag and with the endorsement and encouragement of Liberals who are gullible to think they fight for the same things. As this Professor finds out, they do not and for all HE is reasonable - they aren't, for all he is for liberty and freedom - they are not, and for all that Academia has coddled and protected these Progressives, they are NOT allies.

The right was a laughing stock for a long time and now it is the Left's turn.

 

[Yuri Bezmenov]

This is also one of those weird things where, as a bleeding-heart liberal, I kinda wish the liberal media coverage was a bit less... extreme, I guess?  I'm seeing, for example, a lot of comparisons to this vs. black lives matter protests, media coverage of them, police response to them, etc.  Except I am not seeing much difference in media coverage (that may just be what I'm seeing in my own little echo chamber, though).  And while the police responses to black lives matter protests are generally pretty fucked up and shouldn't be the way they are, those protests aren't usually happening out in the middle of nowhere, so the comparison doesn't seem as direct as press coverage is making it out to be.  It honestly seems like a viable response with these guys (based on what I understand of the Oregon situation) to, as long as they're not hurting anyone (and the situation may or may not escalate on its own), just let them sit there until they get hungry and bored, which thus far seems to be about what's being done.

Maybe I'm missing something?

What the media is missing is that the feds are handling this while local police handle Black Lives Matter protests.  This, to a large extent, explains away why they haven't all been shot already.

Actually, this is the exact opposite of what happened but don't let the facts get in the way of you arguments there Mr. Lawyer. 

[MLA]

This is also one of those weird things where, as a bleeding-heart liberal, I kinda wish the liberal media coverage was a bit less... extreme, I guess?  I'm seeing, for example, a lot of comparisons to this vs. black lives matter protests, media coverage of them, police response to them, etc.  Except I am not seeing much difference in media coverage (that may just be what I'm seeing in my own little echo chamber, though).  And while the police responses to black lives matter protests are generally pretty fucked up and shouldn't be the way they are, those protests aren't usually happening out in the middle of nowhere, so the comparison doesn't seem as direct as press coverage is making it out to be.  It honestly seems like a viable response with these guys (based on what I understand of the Oregon situation) to, as long as they're not hurting anyone (and the situation may or may not escalate on its own), just let them sit there until they get hungry and bored, which thus far seems to be about what's being done.

Maybe I'm missing something?

What the media is missing is that the feds are handling this while local police handle Black Lives Matter protests.  This, to a large extent, explains away why they haven't all been shot already.

Actually, this is the exact opposite of what happened but don't let the facts get in the way of you arguments there Mr. Lawyer. 

Thanks for the update Failed Geologist 

[Yuri Bezmenov]

Sure thing, failed Lawyer.