One More Thing to Blame on England: the Nevada Ranch Stand-off

I have been fascinated by the ongoing stand-off in Nevada between the Federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and a Nevada rancher, Cliven Bundy. As I write this, reports are coming in that the Feds are in retreat, and are abandoning their effort to round up the evil Bundy cows.

I thought of titling this post, "Is it April 19, 1775, yet?" or, "Will Cattle Lead Stampede for Liberty?" but decided to go with one blaming England.

Ostensibly at issue in this stand-off are some $1.3 million in fees the Feds say Bundy owes the BLM for grazing his cattle on Federal land since 1993, when Bundy stopped paying. Bundy replies that he and his family have grazed that land since just after the Civil War, have ancestral rights to it, and that the Feds arbitrarily changed the rules on him when they put 100,000's of acres off limits beginning in 1993 to protect a rare desert tortoise.

The Feds, who for this operation must have had their PR designed and executed by the same idiots who decided that a low-level flyover of Manhattan in 2009 by Air Force One was a good idea, sent in armed agents in a stream of SUV's, bulldozers, and backhoes, with helicopters buzzing overhead, and began rounding up hundreds of cattle, and, reportedly, euthanizing at least some of them. In addition, some genius decided that for crowd control reasons, the Feds would set up an officially sanctioned and fenced in "First Amendment Area," where people who didn't like the BLM's actions could express their opposition--there but nowhere else, since the Feds apparently have determined the where and when of the First Amendment. The tone-deaf Feds also have been highlighting environmentalist "concerns" for a species of desert tortoise, as though that makes them appear on the side of goodness and light. Note to the leftards running our government: the American people are fed up with and do not trust "environmentalists," and the image of agents with guns, tasers, helicopters, and police dogs does not convey a warm and cuddly green enviro-message.

I don't know all the legal ins-and-outs of the case and the media have not (Surprise!) done a good job of presenting the case for both sides: I wait for Legal Insurrection (the best blog on the net) to do that. That aside, I am struck by the arrogance and high-handedness of the Feds. We see a genuinely totalitarian atmosphere, an air of living and operating removed from everyday reality in the way our government now works. We have seen this before, generally under Democratic administrations, e.g., the Clinton-Reno handling of Waco, but not exclusively so, e.g., the 1992 Bush (41) handling of Ruby Ridge, but under this administration that totalitarian impulse has gone on steroids, e.g., the use of the IRS and EPA to suppress dissent; the use of the ATF to build a bogus case against gun ownership with "Fast and Furious"; the ramming through of Obamacare ready or not, wanted or not; the use of the auto bailout to close pro-Repubilican car dealers, etc. Did the Bundy case really rise to this level of Federal action? A dispute over a million dollars in land use fees? Really? What has this operation cost the taxpayers? More important, what has this operation cost the government in the one resource it no longer has in great stock, the public trust?

The popular reaction, as one can see by going to Drudge, has been strong with protestors clashing with BLM and National Park Service agents. Bundy supporters have been driving in from across the country to confront the Feds, and help Bundy retrieve his cattle. The BLM, apparently, has announced that it will abandon its cattle round up, and, as noted above, the Feds seem in retreat, something that could have great significance for the future.

What we have on display is the perennial clash between two English traditions or tenets: the first, respect for the "Crown" and the law; the second, a demand for individual liberty. Where those two rub up against each other the resulting friction produces a lot of heat and, at times, even flame. On another April, this one in 1775, we saw those two English principles also come into conflict when Royal troops went into the Massachusetts countryside to retrieve guns and some powder defiantly stored by English farmers. The resulting clash, which began on April 19, 1775, saw the Royal troops retreat in the face of an armed countryside, and served as the spark for the American Revolution. Angry and armed English farmers should not be your enemy of first choice. That Revolution was a continuation of a great theme in the English Civil War, the battle over the nature of the individual's relationship to the Leviathan. The victors in the American Revolution were those Englishmen who held liberty above loyalty to the crown.

The cow "war" in the Nevada desert, perhaps, could provide the spark that lights a more widespread resistance to the increasing arrogance and stupidity of those who now operate in the name of our "Crown," His Royal Majesty Barack I. If it is true that the Feds have had to back down, this event could well be the watershed in a new struggle to preserve our English liberties.

Blame it on England. I do.