The occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by “Patriot” anti-government extremists, now well into its third week, has made their unique lawless ideology a focus of both speculation and analysis. Unlike the genuine complaints of mainstream conservatives of good will or even most populist voters, the anti-government occupiers are seeking something radically different than redress through ballot boxes and the judiciary, and that is a difference of definition, not degree.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley articulated the genuine disappointment of many in her Republican response following the president’s State of the Union address, noting, “a frustration with a government that has grown day after day, year after year, yet doesn’t serve us any better.” For these extremists, however, it is not government’s unwieldy size, frustrating excess, or trajectory; rather its illegitimacy and tyranny that justifies a takeover by force of arms under their insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment.
If the occupation has done anything, it has served as another marker, at least temporarily, to demarcate where mainstream dissent ceases to be either; eroding into extremism. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “there are limits to the anti-government fervor coursing through the Republican presidential campaign.”
The political Left stresses the intermingling commonalities that sometimes conjoin segments of freewheeling mainstream populism with that of anti-government extremists regarding outcomes, fears, tone and at times demagoguery. While these mainstream flirtations with extremism are relevant, conservatives as a whole notably embrace local authority and the rule of law, two things particularly under assault by this month’s Oregon occupation.
As we noted recently in the New York Daily News:
“The Mormon Church, the church of occupation leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy; the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association, whose members imprisonment helped spark the situation; presidential candidate Ted Cruz; County Sheriff David Ward, and many local residents have bluntly disavowed their actions. Even the convicted arsonists, whose release is demanded by the armed occupiers, want nothing to do with siege.”
This public rejection by conservatives is with good reason. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Senior Fellow Mark Pitcavage, two-thirds of the squatters belong to the anti-government Patriot movement, while one-third are the latest incarnation of the Wise Use movement, which vigorously opposes, including sometimes by force, federal regulation of lands. One quarter of them have promoted bigotry including anti-Semitism, racism or anti-Muslim sentiment, and nearly all are from out of state. Past and present rhetoric by some occupiers includes a call for a senator’s arrest, a threat of bogus indictments against federal workers, armed confrontations with Muslim journalists, not to mention a stated desire to shoot Hillary Clinton. While the extremists’ grievances are varied, their belief in the illegitimacy of the federal government is a key shared philosophy.
As our center firmly advised Congress last year, Salafist Jihadists are the most prominent current terror threat, but extreme right wing militants are second, having killed the more Americans, 48, since 9/11 according to the New America Foundation. Militia groups, while down from previous years grew to 276 in 2015, a 37 percent annual increase according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The tempered political response by conservatives, at least initially, to this occupation is markedly different than the approving one that occupation leader Ammon Bundy’s family had in 2014 when armed militia activists, reportedly with sniper support, caused authorities to retreat from enforcing a federal court order at his father Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada.
Patriarch rancher Cliven Bundy was originally embraced by conservative politicians and media, as an everyday avuncular hero of sorts, but was unceremoniously jettisoned by them after he disturbingly mused about “negroes.” Were they “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy,” he asked a New York Times reporter. The Bundy’s star was also diminished after two extremists who were dismissed by organizers from the 2014 standoff, later assassinated two Las Vegas police officers in a bloody ambush. Over half of the occupiers in today’s Oregon takeover participated in the Nevada Bundy ranch standoff two years earlier — emboldened by the lack of enforcement against them or the Bundys.
While there are symbolic political aspects to the occupation, it is also a serious federal felony. Seditious Conspiracy outlaws the use of “force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof” and is punishable by up to twenty years imprisonment. Additionally, as early as 1886 the Supreme Court authoritatively outlined the risks of private militias in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252:
“The right voluntarily to associate together as a military company or organization or to drill or parade with arms, without, and independent of, an act of Congress or law of the State authorizing the same, is not an attribute of national citizenship. Military organization and military drill and parade under arms are subjects especially under the control of the government of every country. They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law. … The Constitution and laws of the United States will be searched in vain for any support to the view that these rights are privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States independent of some specific legislation on the subject.”
Conservatives are right to embrace their beliefs and peacefully pursue them through nonviolent legal change, and they are also currently right to distance themselves from those who do not. Let’s hope that people all along the political spectrum continue to do so.
Prof. Brian Levin is director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, and Prof. Kevin Grisham is the assistant director. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
