Why Ammon Bundy’s Oregon standoff is doomed to fail


Andrew Romano

January 5, 2016





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Ammon Bundy addresses the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., on January 5, 2016. (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

If you want to understand why the armed men who seized the empty headquarters of Oregon’s remote Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Saturday are doomed to fail — despite vowing to hunker down for “as long as it takes” to defeat the “tyranny” of Washington, D.C., and threatening “to kill or be killed” if necessary — then you have to understand a few other things first. Things like grazing fees, desert tortoises and the property clause of the United States Constitution.
In short, you have to understand the larger war for control of the American West.
On one side of the Oregon flare-up is the federal government, which owns surprisingly vast swaths of the western half of the country, ranging from 29.9 percent of Montana to 84.5 percent of Nevada, and just over half, 53.1 percent, of Oregon.
On the other side are a bunch of antigovernment types who think that Uncle Sam shouldn’t own this much land, and who, for both economic and ideological reasons, would rather the more laissez-faire states owned it instead.
“Once [the people] can use these lands as free men, then we will have accomplished what we came to accomplish,” Bundy told reporters over the weekend.
SLIDESHOW – Armed militia standoff in Oregon >>>
The basic battle lines here aren’t new. Westerners have always seen themselves as rugged individualists, and the current clash has its roots in a law that Congress passed during Civil War.
But what has changed in recent years is that these Westerners are now willing to use confrontational, even violent, tactics to get their point across — a decision that is almost certain to undermine the larger cause to which they profess their allegiance.
Most of the blame belongs to a single family: the Bundys.
Ammon Bundy, 40, is the ringleader of the posse now occupying the Malheur refuge center; his brother Ryan and another Bundy brother are also reportedly among the occupiers. Last week, Ammon Bundy traveled 1,000 miles north from his home in Phoenix to attend a rally in Burns, Ore., ostensibly in support of Dwight Hammond Jr., 74, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, a pair of local ranchers who were convicted three years ago of burning federal lands in a dispute with the government over grazing rights for their cattle, then ordered in October to return to prison after a federal judge ruled that their original sentences were too short.
As soon as the rally ended, however, the Bundys and at least dozen like-minded outsiders they had summoned to Burns — including Jon Ritzheimer, a former Marine from Phoenix whose anti-Muslim rhetoric and activities triggered an FBI manhunt in November 2015, and other gun-toting vigilantes who travel around the country latching onto various local fights against the federal government — split off and took over a couple of unstaffed Malheur administrative buildings.
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Protesters gather at the Bureau of Land Management’s base camp near Cliven Bundy’s Bunkerville, Nev., ranch on April 12, 2014. (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

Such is the Bundy way. In April 2014, Ammon’s father, Cliven, 68, led an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at the Bundy family ranch in Bunkerville, Nev., that involved more than 100 antigovernment militiamen and came very close to erupting into the next Waco or Ruby Ridge. “If a car had backfired,” one militiaman told Harper’s, “the shooting would have started.”
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