Sovereign criminals

Hi all... a quick Public Service Announcement before I get to today's post.

My publisher has set up a Facebook fan page for me, where I'll be periodically posting teasers from my fiction, announcing new releases, and discussing writing, reading, and the meaning of life.  I welcome you all to join it and participate -- I'll be checking it often and would love to have some interesting conversations going.  It's called The Bonnet Conspiracy (a nod to Skeptophilia's content) -- head over there and join if you're interested.  Hope to see you there!

**********************************

You probably remember Ryan and Ammon Bundy, sons of Cliven Bundy, who decided to protest government interference in grazing rights by taking over a bird sanctuary in Oregon.

The Bundys and other members of Yokel Haram occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Sanctuary Headquarters for several weeks before the Feds shot and killed one of them (he was in the process of drawing a gun while running a roadblock) and the remainder decided that discretion was the better part of valor and gave themselves up.

The problem is (from the Bundys' standpoint, at least), "giving up" doesn't mean "all is forgiven."  They're facing multiple felony charges, and since they weren't trying to be sneaky about what they were doing, there is ample evidence for the prosecution to capitalize upon.  So you're an anti-government whackjob who has been caught dead to rights in armed occupation of a federally-owned building -- what do you do?

You claim that you're a sovereign citizen over whom the government has no jurisdiction, of course.

Ryan Bundy has filed several legal statements intended to communicate that he believes that the authorities have no right to press charges against him.  The statements, though, all sound like this:

i; ryan c, man, am an idiot of the ‘Legal Society’; and; am an idiot (layman, outsider) of the ‘Bar Association’; and; i am incompetent; and; am not required by any law to be competent; and;,. 

And this:

i; ryan c, man, accept no offer of representation, as no man is qualified to represent i; and; i; ryan c, man, will hold any man liable, in his/her private capacity, for any burden, placed upon i, man, by any man, by way of representation of i; and;,.

Alan Pyke of ThinkProgress explains that the use of lower case, the semicolons, and the other weird structure is a hallmark of legal statements from the "Sovereign Citizen" movement, which claims that governments, laws, state and federal boundaries, and so on and so forth are meaningless, and that the rights of the individual cannot be impinged upon by anything or anybody.  They also have this wacky idea that there is a "shadow government," formed of a secret cabal of bad guys (who sound an awful lot like the Illuminati), who are really running the whole show, and who get their hooks into you every time you file any document with the government -- including birth and marriage certificates, applications for driver's licenses, tax forms, and the census.  They then use your documentation as collateral for borrowing money from their evil cohorts around the world to fund their nefarious doings.

Why my birth certificate should be worth anything to a super-secret ring of evildoers in, say, Azerbaijan is kind of a mystery.  But apparently it is.  So therefore lower case letters and semicolons and armed occupation of bird sanctuaries.

Ryan Bundy [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyway, trying to escape prosecution by declaring himself an idiot isn't the only thing he's been doing.  Since he's been in jail, he's been stockpiling food (once a survivalist, always a survivalist, I guess), and took a bedsheet and braided it into a rope in an apparent plan for an escape attempt.  The guards objected, oddly enough.  Brought before the judge to defend himself against charges of attempted escape, he said that he was just "a rancher, trying to practice braiding rope."

So his "you can't tell me what to do" strategy seems to be falling on deaf ears so far.  Not that it'll discourage him from trying.  These types don't give up, even though the funny thing is, the sovereign citizen defense never works.  Ask actor Wesley Snipes, who tried it to avoid prosecution for tax evasion.  The judge basically said, "Nice try.  Next time try looking up the definition of the word 'jurisdiction.'  See you in three years."

So I don't expect that it's going to work any better for Bundy et al.  It's a fittingly loony postscript on an event that was pretty surreal from the outset.  You have to wonder how he's going to act once he gets to prison, which seems like the likeliest outcome.  "I refuse to share a cell.  Sovereign citizens require private quarters, as befits someone who rules his own destiny.  And steak for dinner every night."

To which I expect the warden will respond, "What we have here is... a failure to communicate."

Waiting out the whiners

So now the members of Yokel Haram currently occupying the headquarters building of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon have decided to further erode any support they may have had by rifling through 4,000 irreplaceable artifacts of the Paiute Tribe, and bulldozing a line around the refuge building's property without any consideration of archaeologically sensitive sites.

"I’ve gotten calls from ranching families who support the tribe," tribe chairperson Charlotte Roderique said.  "They’ve seen the [Paiute] campsites out there.  They’ve been in that area and they know where things are.  You can’t go and bulldoze things.  I don’t know what these people are doing, if they are doing things to just get a rise or to be martyr—all they are doing is making enemies out of the people they professed to support."

One of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, posted a video of himself pawing through the artifacts, and tried to cast it as concern over how the artifacts were being stored.  "We want to make sure these things are returned to their rightful owners and that they’re taken care of,” Finicum said.  "This is how Native Americans’ heritage is being treated.  To me, I don’t think it’s acceptable."

The Natives themselves don't seem to have that attitude.  "I got a question for the world," said Jarvis Kennedy, Burns Paiute Tribal Council member.  "What would happen if it was Natives out there taking over the building?  Or any federal land?  What would the outcome be?  Think about it.  What would happen?  Would they let us come into town to get supplies?  We as Harney County residents can stand on our own feet.  We don’t need some clown to come in here and stand up for us.  We survived without them before, we'll survive without them when they're gone.  So they just need to get the hell out.  We didn't ask for them here, we don't want them here.  They say they don't want to bother the community, but our kids are sitting at home right now when they should be at school.  They're scaring our people.  They need to go home.  We don't need them."

Ammon Bundy [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Kind of unequivocal, isn't it?  Of course, statements from Paiute leaders are likely to have no effect, given the fact that Ammon Bundy and his crew seem to have the idea that laws are more like strongly-worded suggestions, and any time someone says "You can't do that," it directly contravenes the Constitution, and probably the Word of God as well.  

The thing is, their whole stance is a sham right from the outset.  Their claims that they're doing what they do because they're concerned about the rights of citizens to their own property are shown as the lies they are by their actions.  Jacqueline Keeler, over at Indian Country Today Media Network, told us how much concern these people have for others' property:

Carla Burnside, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's archaeologist at the refuge, has told the tribe that she has seen pictures in news reports of militants sitting in her office, even at her desk with files open that contain sensitive information about archaeological sites belonging to the tribe.

And as far as their claims of respecting Native lands and artifacts, that's bullshit, too.  Keeler writes:

Bundy supporters have damaged Native American archaeological sites before, most notably, when they drove ATVs through a canyon trail in Utah in protest of protected federal lands trampling the ruins of homes belonging to the ancient Puebloans.  Also, the Southern Paiute tribes in Nevada have accused the Bundy family of defacing ancient Paiute petroglyphs in Gold Butte.

These are the kind of people who should have access to archaeological sites and a vital wildlife refuge in the name of protecting private interests?

And another thing: we need to stop calling these scofflaws a "militia."  Their favorite Constitutional Amendment, the Second, talks about a "well-regulated militia."  But regulated by whom?  Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution says the following about militias:

The Congress shall have Power To... provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;  [and]

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

Did you catch that bit about a true militia being overseen by Congress?  That's a pretty important bit.

These aren't militiamen.  These are butthurt whiners who resent any legal incursion into their being able graze their cattle wherever they want to for free.  They don't want justice; they want carte blanche to flout whatever laws they find inconvenient, and no costs or consequences.  Furthermore, they're hypocrites.  They rail against the welfare state and "government handouts" while accepting government loan money to the tune of $530,000, and still want to appear to be the wronged party.

But given that they are heavily armed butthurt whiners, the government has (understandably) not been eager to step in and create a bunch of Waco-style martyrs for the cause.  No one doubts that these people would fire if they felt threatened, and more than one of them has stated his willingness to die rather than surrender.  So the authorities are playing a waiting game, while the costs for the extra security and monitoring of the standoff are running into the tens of thousands of dollars a day -- a cost that Harney County judge Steve Grasty has stated is going to be billed to the Bundy family.

So I understand why the feds aren't storming the castle.  But man, it just pisses me off that a bunch of petulant children with big guns can simply waltz in and take over public land (public, you know?  Meaning owned in trust for all of us?), and everyone simply stands around waiting.

My solution would be to block the (government-maintained) roads so they can't get out, stop the (government-provided) mail service, and cut the (government-managed) electricity and water to the refuge headquarters.  See how long they last in an eastern Oregon January with no help from the people they claim are the pinnacles of evil in our society.