Like most other federal facilities that aren’t directly concerned with law enforcement or national defense, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a vast tract of land near the town of Burns in eastern Oregon, was closed on Saturday, January 2, 2016 in observance of the New Year holiday weekend. There’s an administration center there, consisting of several rustic stone and wood frame buildings set in an otherwise deserted, essentially uninhabited, high Western plains landscape. Under cover of darkness that night, a group of individuals, some of whom, at least, were armed, occupied those buildings, subsequently notifying whoever would listen that they comprise a militia with serious issues regarding the relationship between the citizens of the United States of America and its central government.
In a matter of hours, those moronic shenanigans cut my New Years holiday weekend off short – no Sunday breakfast of duck eggs Benedict, blood orange mimosas, cappuccino and biscotti in bed with my dear Cerise for me, no sir. Around six o’clock on Sunday morning, the telephone at my home in Great Falls, Virginia began ringing off the hook, and by eight thirty, I was in my Washington DC office, booked solid throughout the entire day for consultations with nattering GS-15 and SES ninnies from a panoply of federal agencies, all of them anxiously wringing their hands over how the current situation would affect their images, their reputations with their superiors, and their precious careers. Naturally, I did my best to keep them focused on producing useful ideas to resolve the situation, sometimes with discernible, if albeit limited, success. Then, about ten-fifteen, my cell phone began receiving voice mail messages from my brother-in-law, Hank, requesting that I call him immediately, if not sooner. In this case, “immediately” worked out to be something along the lines of three-thirty in the afternoon, when I received notice from an excited division director at the Department of the Interior that, due to an urgent summons from the White House, he would need to postpone his arrival until at least four. Actually, he sounded somewhat delighted – his bureaucratic mission concerns management of habitats for wild birds (the Malheur Refuge has millions, over three hundred species, both migratory and local), and I doubt anybody from the White House had ever contacted him before about anything.
Tom: Hello, Hank?
Hank: Tom! Where the hell have you been? Shannon and I have been calling you all [expletive] day!
Tom: Sorry, I’ve been busy. I’m here at the office dealing with some God-awful mess a bunch of gun-toting idiots have made on some federal wildlife refuge out in the middle of nowhere.
Shannon: They’re not idiots!
Tom: Shannon?
Shannon: They’re patriots!
Tom: One person’s idiot is another person’s patriot, I suppose. You have your cell phone in hands-free mode, I assume?
Shannon: Yes!
Tom: In your SUV?
Hank: Yeah, how can you tell?
Tom: I hear traffic.
Hank: We’re at a rest stop on I-64 between Lexington and Louisville.
Tom: Kentucky?
Hank: Right.
Tom: What’s in Kentucky? I thought you two were preparing for Armageddon in West Virginia.
Hank: We’re, uh… just passing through.
Tom: To where?
Hank: To… um… well… ah…
Shannon: To the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge!
Tom: Hank, Shannon – could I interest you two in turning that vehicle around and driving it back to Fairfax, Virginia, where your wife and husband and kids have been waiting patiently for your return?
Shannon: Tom, you ask us that every time we talk to you. I think you know the answer by now.
Tom: But didn’t you just tell me that you’re abandoning your survivalist bunker in order to drive out to Oregon? If you’re going to do that, why not abandon your survivalist bunker and drive back home to Fairfax instead?
Shannon: It’s not like that! We’re not abandoning anything in West Virginia. Everybody had a big meeting and discussed the Malheur situation at length and in great detail. It was agreed that we share a common cause with the patriots there and that the best course of action for support of that cause was for our group to send a delegation to join them.
Tom: And you two volunteered?
Hank: Ah, not volunteered… exactly… it was like…
Shannon: Various logistical factors came under consideration.
Tom: Logistical factors?
Hank: She means we had the vehicle with the best chance of making it to Oregon.
Shannon: And back.
Tom: So you two got selected to deliver beans, bullets, guns and gelignite to a bunch of all-American Caucasian constitutional terrorists holed up in the only buildings on a desolate, isolated, mosquito-infested bird sanctuary the size of New York City?
Hank: Um… yeah, sure looks like it.
Tom: Situated smack dab in the middle of a barely inhabited National Forest twice the size of Rhode Island?
Hank: Really?
Tom: In a part of eastern Oregon so remote and inaccessible, the only practical way to get there is from Idaho?
Hank: You’re making this up to scare us, aren’t you?
Tom: No, I’m not.
Shannon: Okay, if you’re not making all that stuff up, how come you suddenly know it, just like that?
Tom: Because, as I said, I have spent the last nine hours with more flavors of feds than Baskin-Robbins has ice creams, going over all the sordid details concerning the pathetic hell-hole to which you two are headed with such naive and overweening enthusiasm.
Shannon: Oh. Well, then, that’s just your opinion.
Tom: No, those are the facts.
Shannon: Facts? You want facts? How about these facts! The Hammond Family has owned its lands in eastern Oregon since the 1870s, and the feds have wanted for decades to turn that land into a wildlife preserve, but the Hammonds would never, ever sell it, and the feds could never, ever get the courts to make them hand it over under eminent domain, either, because the feds could never make a convincing case for it; and that’s because any eminent domain case placing a bunch of birds and bunnies over a man’s right to earn a living on his own land is total [expletive]! But the feds never give up when they want your land. So as it happened, in 2001, the Hammonds set a fire to remove invasive, non-native weeds – the seeds of which, by the way, had originated on poorly managed federal land – from their own, private property, and also, I’ll have you know, duly notified the local fire department before they did it. But then, the wind shifted and that fire accidentally spread to federal land and burned a hundred acres of it before the Hammonds could put it out – by themselves. So after that, the feds started pressuring the Hammonds again, trying to get them to give up their land, all the time holding the prospect of prosecution over the Hammond’s heads, but they still refused to sell. Then, in 2006, a lightning storm started a brush fire on the Hammond property, and they started a backfire to push it away, and that backfire burned one lousy acre of federal land, supposedly endangering some volunteer firefighters who were camped half a mile away. So, the next day, the cops show up and arrest old man Hammond and his son. The feds take them to court and accuse the Hammonds of setting the fires to cover up evidence of illegal deer poaching on federal land. The Hammonds get tried and convicted, sentenced to a year in jail and serve it. But after they get out, they still won’t sell their land to the feds. So the feds go to a judge and get him to say that one year in prison wasn’t enough – the Hammonds have to serve five years, because that’s the minimum sentence for arson on federal property! Now, how do you like those facts, huh?
Tom: Well, they’re not all facts, but they’ll do. You left some important facts out, however. The Hammonds intend to surrender peacefully and do the five years. Furthermore, a large, peaceful rally was held in the town of Burns to support them. It was only afterward that an armed band of so-called militia, lead by a couple of fellows named Ammon and Ryan Bundy, decided to take over the administration building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Shannon: Yeah, so?
Tom: So, while the Bundys and their accomplices claim to speak for the Hammonds, it’s pretty obvious they speak for nobody but themselves. And the Bundy brothers, as all three of us know, are the sons of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who owes the Bureau or Land Management over one million dollars in unpaid grazing fees.
Hank: That’s right – and Ammon said in the video he posted on Facebook that it will become a base place for patriots from all over the country to come bring their weapons and be housed there and live there. He’s planning on having patriots stay there for several years.
Tom: Stay there? That’s easy to say in January, but just wait until spring, when the hoards of stinging, biting bugs come out and start eating them all alive. Why do you think the place has umpteen million birds, for Pete’s sake? They go there to eat the vast clouds of insects.
Hank: Uh, well, I don’t think we’re going to be staying all that long.
Shannon: That’s right – the plan is to drop off the um… supplies… and render support for six to twelve weeks, then return to West Virginia.
Tom: Assuming that the feds let you out, once they’ve surrounded the place, that is.
Hank: Surround the place? What makes you think they’re going to do that?
Tom: Let’s just say a little bird told me – and it wasn’t any migratory entomophagous warbler from Oregon, either. No, I’d say it looked like a Potomac Hawk, raptor proditorum majoris, Hank. Nasty feathered fellow. I wouldn’t mess with him if I were you.
Shannon: Tom! Quit trying to frighten Hank! The rights of individuals must be protected from tyranny!
Tom: You mean the Bundy clan has a right to feed their cattle on public land, sell those cattle, make money and pay nothing to the American people who own that land? Tell me, where in the Constitution did you find the right of wealthy Mormon farmers to flaunt federal government assessments? How is owing a million dollars in grazing fees different from owing the IRS a million dollars in unpaid income taxes?
Shannon: The flaw in your reasoning, Tom, is that income tax happens to be unconstitutional!
Tom: The Supreme Court says otherwise, and until they change their minds, income tax is indeed constitutional, because, by definition, the Constitution means exactly what the current Supreme Court says it does. And since you brought up the Constitution, I would like to point out that the Second Amendment refers to a “well regulated militia,” a term under which that rag-tag assemblage of fools the Bundys have mustered at the wildlife refuge administration building does not qualify. They are no more a “militia” than are the El Salvadoran street gangs we have here in DC and next door in Prince Georges County.
Shannon: Don’t you dare compare a patriot and constitutional scholar like Ammon Bundy with those MS-13 dope pushers and pimps! The Bundys are heroes!
Tom: Listen, Shannon, you’re the one who’s always complaining about freeloaders and moochers who feel entitled to unemployment compensation, disability payments, welfare, SNAP cards, medicaid, medicare, and WIC vouchers. What’s the difference between them and the Bundys feeling they are entitled to make money off public resources?
Shannon: The difference is, the Bundys work for a living!
Tom: So do the millions of American farmers who feel they are entitled to government money for crop subsidies, but I don’t see them taking over federal buildings.
Shannon: That’s because they’re getting the money they deserve, not being arrested and harassed by jackbooted federal thugs! The Bundys know what Edmund Burke said, that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing!
Tom: So requiring ranchers to pay grazing fees is a “triumph of evil?” Listen, Shannon, if the BLM didn’t regulate use of public grazing land, it would be a race to the bottom – a classic Tragedy of the Commons, the only difference being that the animals involved would be cattle instead of sheep. Do the Bundys and the other ranchers have an inalienable right to destroy the environment and future agricultural resources through unrestricted exploitation of open range land for which none of them have any property interest, and therefore no particular responsibility?
Shannon: “If you love the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, we ask not your counsel. Go – crouch down and lick the hands of the tyrants who feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” – Samuel Adams!
Tom: Oh, boy. Sometimes, I wish that guy had just stuck to brewing beer.
Shannon: Harney County, Oregon was once the wealthiest in the state, and now it is the poorest! What happened? The federal government happened, that’s what! The peoples’ land has been stolen, the peoples’ resources stolen, their jobs stolen, and their rights stolen! And what do most of them do about it? Nothing! They are too domesticated, subjugated, too… castrated to care! Aside from true patriots like the Hammonds and the Bundys, they are all victims of Stockholm Syndrome! Their perpetual slavery at the hands of the tyrants in Washington DC has made them love their captivity and their captors! We live in an age of propaganda and indoctrination, and the vast majority of the American population is completely brainwashed! That’s why, right now, they are demanding that federal storm troopers do something about the ‘”right-wing white terrorists” who are actually heroes fighting for the sacred rights which those… those… ignorant imbeciles have thrown away! Tom, this is the Antichrist we’re dealing with here – Barack Hussein Obama! The masses simply have no idea whatsoever how devious, cunning, nefarious, underhanded and deceitful that amoral spawn of Satan can be!
Tom: Hmmm… yeah… um, I must admit, you have a point there.
Shannon: You what?
Tom: I understand.
Shannon: You mean, you… agree with me?
Tom: Well, I was just thinking, you know, about how here’s this place, this bird sanctuary, way out away from everything else, with nothing around it for miles and miles.
Hank: Uh-huh. What about it?
Tom: It’s just that, you know… anything could happen out there, and it would just be the government’s word against, well, whoever survived, if anyone did, that is.
Shannon: Um… yeah, I would imagine that’s… possible.
Tom: And here are these guys, the Bundy brothers, announcing that all the… well, people such as yourselves, who aren’t brainwashed… they should convene at that place, more or less en masse, you know?
Hank: Right – that’s what they’re saying.
Tom: And I was wondering to myself, if a place like that isn’t just more or less perfect for tracking who goes in and who comes out. Because, I mean, if you look at a map, that building complex is bordered on two sides by a lake, and there’s only three roads that lead to it, and two of those are dead ends; so the only way in or out is Narrows-Princeton Road, which leads to Oregon State Route 205, and that’s the only highway you can get to there on.
Hank: Pretty isolated. It’s like you’re boxed in, kinda.
Tom: Nobody enters or leaves without driving to the intersection of Narrows-Princeton Road and Route 205, that’s for sure. There’s a place called Narrows there. It’s basically just a truck stop, and the only thing between that and the wildlife refuge buildings is something called the Black Ridge Ranch. Satellite pictures show a residence, some barns and stables, that’s it.
Hank: Oh, man, this is beginning to sound really… creepy.
Tom: Maybe one family lives there. Shouldn’t be too hard to keep them quiet, eh? Furthermore, satellite pictures from around the wildlife sanctuary building complex show plenty of places the feds could set up all kinds of surveillance – long range cameras, infrared sensors, seismic motion detectors, parabolic microphones, the works. And it’s a sure bet that if the feds haven’t already sent in a special operations team to bug the place and install pinhole lens cameras everywhere, they’re going to be doing it tonight.
Hank: Holy [expletive]! You won’t be able to cut a [expletive] in there without the NSA knowing about it!
Tom: As for cell phone coverage, the closest tower is in Hines, fifteen miles away. And even if anyone at the wildlife refuge does get a signal, the feds are going to be recording every single word of any conversation that person manages to have, of course. Actually, according to what I might as well surmise based on… let’s say… what I’m aware of as of today, no telecommunication is going in or out of that place without complete federal monitoring. I don’t care if somebody’s sitting there tapping out Morse code on a crystal set radio, the NSA is going to get every dot and dash.
Hank: [Expletive]! We’ll be living in a fish bowl – like the animals in a [expletive] zoo!
Tom: Absolutely. And unless you can maintain strict control over what you say, when you leave, Obama’s dark legions will know everything they need to track down all your… associates… in West Virginia, not to mention the whereabouts of all your… supplies and… shelters.
Hank: [Expletive]! We’d be [expletive]! Totally [expletive]!
Tom: Indubitably. Now let’s connect the dots, shall we? Out of all the places they could have chosen to occupy, the Bundys selected a complex of buildings in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge – a place that’s completely isolated, cut off from the rest of the world in a desolate wilderness with limited access into and out of it, perfect for federal surveillance and intervention. And then what did they do? They invited people like them from all over the country – people like you two, for instance – to come there. Now, what do you suppose they were thinking when they…
Shannon: Jesus H. Christ on a [expletive] crutch! It’s a false flag attack!
Hank: It’s a what?
Shannon: It’s a [expletive] trap!
Hank: What do you mean, a [expletive] trap?
Shannon: Look where they want all the patriots and survivalists to go – to a place where they’ll all be totally alone together in the wilderness with every route of escape cut off! It’s like we’re driving cross-country to enter a [expletive] concentration camp! Obama’s goons could just swoop down and massacre us and nobody would even [expletive] know about it!
Hank: But why would the Bundys want to trap us?
Shannon: Think about it! How do we know that really is the Bundys?
Hank: It’s not?
Shannon: Or what if the feds have something really big on them, something that would make them cut a deal to double cross all of us, just to save their own miserable hides?
Hank: Say, Tom?
Tom: Yes?
Hank: Is she being… you know… paranoid?
Tom: Well now, just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean the feds aren’t out to get you, now does it?
Hank: Uh… uh… I guess not.
Tom: Oh, and before this goes on too much further, could you tell me why you wanted to talk to me?
Hank: Ah, yeah, um… we wanted to ah… let you know about what was happening out there in Oregon and Shannon thought maybe you would finally see what we’ve been talking about and maybe kick in some money.
Tom: Are you still planning to drive out there now?
Hank: I… I guess…
Shannon: Definitely not! I’m sure we would have figured out that it’s a false flag attack plot on our own, of course, while driving there.
Tom: Good thing Oregon is so far away from West Virginia. When do you suppose you would have seen through the Antichrist’s latest ruse – by the time you crossed Colorado, perhaps?
Shannon: Hmph! Probably sooner; right, Hank?
Hank: Yeah, yeah, sure. Before we got to Kansas, I bet. But… Tom?
Tom: Yes?
Hank: Can you send us some money anyhow? I mean, we were hoping to get there with ten grand if we could convince you to see the light and all, only now, uh, I donno, maybe…
Shannon: Will five hundred for gas be okay?
Tom: Oh, all right. Either of your phones have PopMoney?
Hank: Uh, uh… no, I don’t think so.
Tom: Call me back after you’ve downloaded it and I’ll send you five hundred bucks. But only if you both promise to call your families. It’s the tenth day of Christmas, so wish them a merry one and throw in a Happy New Year if it’s not too much trouble.
Hank: Okay, Tom. Will do.
Tom: How about you, Shannon?
Shannon: Yeah, yeah, okay. Hank, turn this [expletive] thing around and head back to West Virginia. ‘Bye Tom.