By ann summers

Malheur Wildlife Refuge’s standoff even with its indicted malingerers demonstrates the abject FAIL of the Bundystani attempt to create a county-level bantustan near Burns, Oregon. However, chances are the armed farces now cruising Burns in their flag-flying pickup trucks have nothing better to do but plan the next poorly organized manipulation of RWNJ LoFos & ‘baggers looking for the next peckerwoodstock.

 

But if we’re wagering on the next such amalgamated attempt to privatize public land, foment racist secession, and threaten to discharge firearms, it could happen again in the West and with Lavoy Finicum’s death now even more cowboy-romanticized, but probably not with a community clearly opposed to outside agitation and lacking more significant local mass support. More likely it will happen in a red state with more sympathetic law enforcement and local government lined up rather than the Bundy expectation that what happens outside Vegas can happen again in Oregon.

​Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer is defending himself on social media as allegations of him turning in the Bundy militia to the FBI continue to grow.

 

It does suggest that federal facilities on a scale not unlike the Oklahoma City event could be targeted, but that any “occupation” mimicking the actual mass movements of the left requires greater scale, ideological unanimity, and more mass and government support in the target region. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has made security arrangements for its other sites if the remaining insurgents try to claim another Sudetenland.

 

One hopes that DHS will actually take the “homeland” part of their title more seriously and not facilitate a DIY South African apartheid that ultimately failed to impose fascist rule on democratic peoples. Pathetic can only describe the presence still of 3% dead-enders in Burns hoping to fight what they probably orginally planned as a arrière-garde action against LEOs in the event of a firefight at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge before the Death of Finicum. This could be merely a dress rehearsal staged by useful idiots for something perhaps better planned and Bundy-free.

During the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King’s tyranny never amounted to more than III% of the colonists. Three percenters today, for the most part, identify with this 3%

 

The group asserts that they are a modern counterpart to that mythical 3% of American Revolutionary-era patriots and also represent the three percent of the population of American gun owners “who will not disarm.”

One wonders whether a strategic military alliance with a major nation that didn’t give us eponymous Freedom vanilla creamer had any historical role in the 3% worldview. Evidently Yorktown is not part of that 3% revisionist history of armed struggle that required not only civilian resistance but significant espionage networks. Cosplay revolutionary fantasy should be even more unpleasant to enact at home for those veterans who know how actual close quarter battle is conducted in our continuing wars for oil.

It is clear that these anti-government extremist groups are trying both to exploit and to fan the anti-government sentiment that has grown over President Obama’s first year in office, as well as to support each other’s efforts. Rhodes has written supportively of the Three Percenters, while at least two participants carried the Three Percenter flag at an Oath Keepers event at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., on September 12, 2009.  That event was staged on the same day that an anti-government Tea Party rally in the city attracted tens of thousands of people, the largest to date of the protests held against the government and Obama since he took office.

In some US counties, sheriffs primarily do baliff and jail duty, but in others as with the Burns, Oregon escapade, their cooperation or lack of it can contribute to or at least cover for quasi-insurrectionist actions at a larger scale. Like Jim Crow’s local law enforcement often overlapping racist militia groups, local authorities can have mixed sympathies and interests. Examples of this in Oregon among other places have occured in how local law enforcement has openly attempted to exercise some anti-Constitutional autonomy in legal interpretation.

US sheriffs lay down challenge to Obama in public vow to defy gun laws 

And given the generations of secessionist and militia activity in various regions ranging from neo-nazi to other racist variants, one can speculate as to whether the generations of inhabitants also have a degree of support in the law enforcement community much as the Oath Keepers have tried to exploit prior constitutional experience such as in the military.

The next Bundy-like action whether stunt or sedition in whatever state, may have quite different outcomes depending on the degree of lawlessness in local governments, and their predisposition for autonomy. 

The Bundys’ desire to balkanize state power by locating it in county-level authorities to support their sovereign citizen agenda can only find support from like-minded local officials who see the Constitution as so flexible as to make such localism a return to manorial pre-modern societies with its attendent violence, both real and symbolic.

It now becomes important for citizens to ask how their locality might be hiding other public officials who harbor sympathies for RWNJ insurgents, and the libertarian dream of a post-secession warlord America more like Somalia will take one step closer.