Forum Post: SPLC Investigation of the Bundy Ranch "Standoff"

Someone should inform them that most REAL cowboys were Native Americans, Mexicans and Black people.

But anyway, very informative report.

"As officers of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department withdrew from Cliven Bundy’s Bunkerville, Nev., ranch on April 12, the question had to be asked: How could a scofflaw like Bundy, who owes more than $1 million in grazing fees but was backed up by hundreds of armed antigovernment zealots, manage to run off federal officials who clearly were in the right for seizing Bundy’s cows as payment for what he owes? The standoff very nearly ended in bloodshed, as large numbers of Bundy supporters pointed their weapons at law enforcement officials, a felony that is now under investigation by the FBI. The BLM wisely withdrew, avoiding possible violence.

The Bundy standoff has invigorated an extremist movement that exploded when President Obama was elected, going from some 150 groups in 2008 to more than 1,000 last year. Though the movement has waxed and waned over the last three decades, antigovernment extremists have long pushed, most fiercely during Democratic administrations, rabid conspiracy theories about a nefarious New World Order, a socialist, gun-grabbing federal government and the evils of federal law enforcement. Today’s disputes with federal authority, many long simmering, are an extension of the earlier right-wing Sagebrush Rebellion, Wise Use and “county supremacy” movements."

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/War-in-the-West-The-Bundy-Ranch-Standoff-and-the-American-Radical-Right

And a link to the full report.

http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/war_in_the_west_report.pdf