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Dec. 7, 2017 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
39:04
Get Off My Lawn #43 | Fix Be In
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From New York, get off my lawn.
Kevin McGuinness.
She was 17 and she was far from in-between.
It was summertime in northern Michigan.
That's a jam.
Drinking whiskey out the bottle, singing sweet home, Alabama, all summer long.
Alabama, bumpa dame fame.
I remember Kid Rock in the early 90s.
He was a rapper who had kooky hair, like a vanilla ice kind of guy, but a little more badass.
Front page of the post, Fix Be In, one of their least, least witty puns.
And it's all about the anti-Trump agent, Peter Stork, who is behind all this Russia crap.
And he hates Trump, loves Hillary, and was running the show over there, running the attack on Trump and letting Hillary off the hook.
It must suck to be a liberal these days, right?
Every time they have a smoking gun, it turns out to be their gun, and they're the perp in it.
But I want to focus today on this move that Trump did to give the federal parks, monuments, I think Obama calls them, back to the states.
And I live with a lot of stupid New York liberals, tattooists especially.
This guy that did my tattoos, he was screaming about this, saying, I want to punch Trump in the face.
Free tattoos for anyone who punches Trump in the face, which is what?
And I thought, I understand that this looks bad to you, but surely we're getting a little more curious about the news these days.
After the 500th fake news story, it probably isn't as simple as, this was a beautiful park like the Grand Canyon, Trump's privatizing it, and now it's going to be strip malls and fracking and oil shooting everywhere, and it's going to be destroyed.
The land's no longer preserved.
Well, that's not the case.
Nothing is better for land than ranchers.
The government sucks at land.
You want to see what the government does with their land?
You want to see what the government does with their forests?
Check out LA right now.
New Los Angeles wildfire is threatening the Getty Center.
It looks like hell.
It looks like that hieronymous Bosch artist guy.
Look at this.
And we're not talking miles and miles away.
This is right on the highway.
It looks like they're driving through hell.
There's four major fires in LA right now, and they're raging.
And I said to Brian Hyde, he's a big ranching commentator, works at Who's Next, and he's been following the Bundy thing forever.
And I said, can this be blamed on the government?
And he said, yes, sort of.
He said, well, he didn't say yes, sort of.
His exact quote was, I spoke to a state legislator recently who told me that the plan with the forestry, with all forestry in the country, is just let it burn because we're harming the environment and climate change.
I know that's pretty ambiguous of an accusation, but that's the mentality.
So when you hear that Trump is giving land back to the state and taking it away from the federal government, he's taking it away from someone who's worse at land than whoever is getting it now.
And it's still government land.
Now, why do I care so much about this?
Because of this.
The cheeseburger.
Now, I've had a few bites of this, so it's not looking that beautiful.
But I think the cheeseburger is one of the most wonderful creations in the world.
I think it proves that the West is the best.
It beats every other sandwich.
I think tacos are stupid.
I've done many videos about this in the past.
It's a grab, grab it as you go food, where you can just, you don't even have to stop walking.
Just keep running, eating your cheeseburger.
You know, the French and the Italians like to sit down for a nine-hour meal and then have a siesta.
That's not us.
We're movers and shakers, and I love the cheeseburger.
And what brings us to the cheeseburger?
Ranchers.
And who benefits from having land not tied up in government bureaucracy?
We do.
Ranchers do.
Cheeseburgers do.
So I feel very strongly about this, giving the monuments back.
And I want to get the full story because as urbanites, we tend to just see them as a bunch of stupid redneck cowboys.
And of course, anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line or anyone in Fly River Country or anyone in a cowboy hat couldn't possibly be as sophisticated as us New Yorkers, as us coastal people in LA, as us tattoo artists and creative types.
We know the environment way better than someone who's been there for hundreds of years.
Sorry, 100 years.
In the case of the Bundies.
So first we're going to talk to Angie Bundy.
Ryan Bundy, he's a guy.
He had an accident as a kid.
His face is kind of sloped.
He just got out of jail on bail.
They've been sitting there for, I think, two years now in jail, and they just got out.
Clivin Bundy refused because he have an ankle bracelet and he says no.
We're also going to talk to Carrie Stadheim.
Now, she's the editor of the Tri-State Livestock News, a newspaper you'll never see and you couldn't care less about, but it is sort of the heart.
It is the New York Times of ranchers, ranchers media.
And then, of course, Brian Hyde, the guy I just talked about, he's been close with the Bundies for over a decade, and he's been following this very closely.
I mean, the Bundies, this LA fire, Trump giving it back, this cheeseburger, they're all related.
And I think the big thing that brings them together is self-hatred.
We don't like cowboys anymore.
We don't like the people who made America.
And at the same time, while we poo-poo these heroes, these guys that make our country great, the guys that feed us, at the same time, we sort of hand over our wrists to the government and say, handcuff me.
You guys know what's better.
Like a dog laying on its back, totally subdued, to the Alpha White House.
Well, I'm on the Side of the Cowboys.
And I believe at the end of this episode, this exclusive, all-encompassing, be-all and end-all episode, all about ranchers and forestry and land grabs and federal land, I think you'll feel the same way.
Angie, how are you doing?
I'm great.
How are you?
I'm good.
Now, with Trump declaring that the federal land should be going back to the individual states, city folk, well, the liberals are freaking out.
They say, oh, he's turning monuments into shopping malls.
But I don't trust my fellow city folk.
And it got everyone talking about the Bundies and a sort of, where are they now?
How is everything going over there?
Who's in jail?
Who's out of jail?
Who's facing charges?
We're all still facing charges.
Well, they have run some through and some have been acquitted.
But I will say that we are making progress to where they've let them all out on bail, which has not happened until now.
So they've been sitting in jail up until some of them, just like yesterday.
Oh, really?
So the fact we are making progress.
Who got out on bail yesterday?
Joe O'Shaughnessy did.
My two brother-in-laws got out two days ago.
My husband got out about three weeks ago, and Ammon got out last week.
So we are making major progress.
Now, just to get everyone up to date, this is all really based on the government saying that the Bundies were not paying their grass tax.
Right.
And I've heard rumors that you tried to pay, and they were prevented.
Well, I'll tell you this right now.
They came up with a really large figure and put that in the media.
It did come out in court last week that what we supposedly owed was more like $8,000 instead of millions.
That's a bit of a discrepancy.
It was like $70,000 $7,500 or something close to that.
So that was just basically something to make us look like, you know, really bad.
My father-in-law has maintained the whole time that the federal government, according to the Constitution, should not own vast tracts of land.
And that is one reason why I understand when you city dwellers don't understand what we're dealing with out west.
Because you guys don't have them maintaining and controlling large spans of your state.
Yeah.
But they have claimed most of Nevada.
So basically, my father maintained all the land belongs to the state of Nevada.
So we're trying to pay our grazing fees or taxes to the state or the county.
And besides the fact that this is, you know, another thing that a lot of the city people don't understand is we don't own 160 acres that are private.
We run cattle on a way bigger portion than that.
And that is through water rights and grazing rights.
So we don't own the land, but we own the forage and we own the water.
So, you know, it's kind of odd.
And then the rest of it is public ground.
Okay, but who owns that?
And we claim that the state or the county, Clark County owns that.
And so, but those are real.
I mean, those grazing rights and those water are real.
You can buy them.
You can sell them.
You can inherit them.
You can trade them just like your house deeds.
So to just have them come in and say, oh, they're ours now, you know, my father-in-law was like, no, no, they're not.
No, you've had them for hundreds of years.
We have.
We've had them over 100 years.
And that's another thing a lot of people get confused on.
They look through the records and they're like, oh, no, it doesn't show Bundy's owning this.
This actually was inherited through Clevin's mother, who's Jensen and Levitt.
So if you look on those records, it's not going to say Bundy.
It's going to say Jensen and Levitt.
Well, look, as an outsider, I go, who are the two warring factions here?
Cowboys and the government?
Okay, what's the government claiming that they're missing?
Well, some of the cows that the Cowboys had ate government grass.
And you go, I didn't know grass was so important to you, White House.
I didn't know you were so worried about your grass.
Well, there's no grass out here on this range either.
There's no grass.
This is like the barren desert.
They actually live on a lot of the scrub brush.
Anyway, I could go into all kinds of things.
Another thing is that cattle actually replenish that grass.
If there's grass there, a cow is going to come up.
She's going to eat the top port.
She's mowing it, is what she's doing.
A horse is a little different.
A horse will grab it by the roots a lot of the time, but a cow won't.
A cow will grab it and she'll eat the top off, which actually encourages it to grow.
Well, yeah, every time the federal government totally takes over this land, it falls apart.
The only time this land thrives is when ranchers are on it.
Well, because how would it benefit us to ruin our range?
It doesn't.
We have to maintain the waters.
We have to maintain the forage.
Otherwise, we lose money.
I will say this, and this was before I married into the family.
We used to camp a lot, you know, growing up.
And when the federal government would come in and take over it, they would ruin it.
I don't mean to be rude.
They don't know how to take care of it.
And they'd say, it's kind of like there was this really beautiful piece of property here.
And all of a sudden, they point at it and say, look, we're going to make this monument.
And then it was ruined.
You'd get a million people in there.
The cows were kicked off.
And no longer were we able to ever go and enjoy it because then it was ruined.
I don't, you know, I'm not against people being out there.
I mean, we're all for that.
But it just seems like once they took over, then, you know, it went downhill from there.
They would come in and they would ruin the springs.
You know, they would try to fence around them and tap them and make them into these.
And it was like, you know, that was a beautiful spring.
You didn't need to do that.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
Honestly, we're the true conservationalists because we have to maintain That property, otherwise, we don't earn a living.
It seems perfectly logical to me.
I don't understand why there's this adoration for the government and this disdain for the ranch.
You know, it's called communism.
If you think that they should own everything, then that's where you go to a communist company.
No, thank you.
If there are people working the land, then they're going to take care of it.
Yep, it's so true, and we've seen it again and again.
Angie, we're out of time, but thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to talk to us.
Well, thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.
And how many kids you have?
Eight kids?
I have eight kids.
And you know what?
One of them found a recorder this morning.
I try to keep those hidden.
So it was really tough around here.
Anyway, you know those little recorders they play at school?
We try to hide those.
Yeah, they're so shrill.
They were playing it really loud.
They make your eardrums rattle.
All right.
Thanks, Sanchez.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
While we were trying different things, and we were smoking funny things.
Making love our brother late to our favorite song.
Carrie, are you there?
I believe so.
Am I?
Yes.
You look great.
You sound great.
Everything is good over there.
Now, where are you?
You're in Utah?
No, no, no.
No, Tri-State Livestock News is located in western South Dakota.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Yep.
So we're Bellefource, South Dakota.
We're actually very near Wyoming, just within a few miles of the Wyoming border and not far from Montana.
Okay, well, here in New York City, when we learned that Trump was giving these monuments back to the states they are in, the general understanding from liberal New Yorkers is that there's going to be shopping malls all over the place and there's going to be fracking and they're all going to be destroyed and he no longer wants to preserve nature.
So there'll be chipbags and old tires everywhere.
Is that what happened?
Well, I think people need to understand that these lands are federal lands.
They're still federal lands.
They just don't have the monument designation on them.
So they're still going to be managed just like federal lands are all across the West.
They still have, if it's BLM land, they still have a BLM person overseeing them.
If it's Forest Service land, they still have a ranger overseeing them.
I mean, there's still, every rule that applies to federal lands still applies to these lands.
So they're not privatized?
Correct.
So what's all the hullabaloo about?
Well, monument designation, you know, puts extra, what they call protections on the land, but really sometimes what happens is it's meant to protect the land, but it doesn't always do what it's meant to do.
And a lot of times the hands-off approach isn't necessarily the best way to manage land.
Right.
So what ends up happening with extra quote-unquote protections is that the grass gets overgrown, you know, trees get overgrown, terrible fire hazards, you know, fires come through that are just completely uncontrollable, that kind of thing.
Not to mention communities dry up and that sort of thing when grazing and logging become less and less available.
So really what hopefully will happen with these shrinking of these monuments is the land will still be federal lands, it'll still be protected by the federal government, but multiple use will be able to be implemented a little bit more.
People will still, the public can still use these lands.
Actually, they should be more accessible to the public than they were under the monument designation.
So really in a lot of ways, I feel like environmentalists or hikers or rock hounds, that kind of thing, should be happy with this announcement because they should have better access to the land than they did before.
It seems logical to me.
There's a guy, Patrick Moore.
He started a Greenpeace or something.
He's since abandoned them.
And he says controversial, counterintuitive things like, if you want more forests, buy more wood.
He said, the best thing for a forest is for people to use paper and wood to make it viable.
And then you look over in Zimbabwe, to choose a crazy example, and Mugabe's livestock, wildlife, was all dying, elephants starving to death, lions dying.
And then he just gave up and said, all right, well, let's privatize it.
And all of a sudden, the game hunters had an incentive, and now wildlife is thriving all over Zimbabwe.
Right, right.
Management is always a good idea.
Good, you know, responsible management is just important.
You know, we've seen the same thing with prairie dogs in our area.
They're environmentalists from the coast that really don't understand what's going on here.
They want to protect them.
Well, they're actually a rodent and they destroy land.
And again, with their quote-unquote protections, is they just, they don't manage them, so they overgrow and there isn't enough food for all of them.
And they start starving and cannibalizing one another.
And it's horrible.
Yeah.
Well, this brings us to the Hammond case.
Now, the general understanding, and I'm convinced it's this sort of anti-cowboyism that we get taught in schools where they go, oh, the ranchers, they're bad.
They're rednecks.
And the Hammonds were arsonists.
And they were just burning the forest willy-nilly.
Well, actually, the Washington Post article that I talked about earlier, I sent it to you, where they go, break out the matches because he was hunting deer illegally.
Now, you read that sentence and you go, what are you burning?
Like your footprints from when you were hunting the deer, the dead deer?
It doesn't make any sense.
And a fire isn't going to burn up a deer.
I mean, it's not going to completely, you know, get rid of it to where there's absolutely no evidence.
So I think that's just a side issue.
I don't even know where that part of it came from as far as burning to try to cover the tracks of the deer.
But, you know, if anybody with any common sense looks at this issue, look at how many hundreds of thousands of acres burn out there in those forests in Oregon and Idaho and Montana and California and Washington when they're dry and when they haven't been logged properly.
And the Hammonds burned, I think it was around 140 acres in two small fires.
One was a backburn to protect their branch headquarters when a lightning struck fire was coming towards them.
And then another one was just a small fire to get rid of some noxious juniper trees that are, you know, they just crowd out the grass and anyone out there knows that they're basically a noxious weed.
I mean it was just a very small fire to do some management on some land.
I mean 140 acres sounds like a lot, I understand, to some people, but you have to look at the scope of these things, these, you know, these landscapes out there.
I mean, it's nothing, and there, again, it wasn't arson.
It was doing the same type of management that the BLM does.
Fires are an integral part of ranching.
They're an integral part of any sort of forest control.
They're an integral part of a forest.
A pine cone can't pop unless it's heated to a certain degree.
We have fires are a crucial part of the environmental balance.
And if you're working with nature, you have to work with fire.
Right.
Arsonists.
Right.
And particularly when there's grass that hasn't been able to be grazed as it should, and trees that haven't been logged as they should.
That is, especially when fire does come into play and is kind of necessary because there's just so much overgrowth that, you know, something has to get rid of all of that dead extra fuel.
It's almost like the people who live on the land and live with the animals in nature know more about it than a bureaucrat in Washington.
It seems that way.
Yes.
It's hard to manage what you can't see.
Right.
Especially when you have no experience in the field.
Right, right.
Now we're running out of time, and I'm sorry to dump all this on you, but the Bundy's, as far as I can see, the government said, you owe me a million dollars in grass, grass munching.
And we were talking to Angie Bundy earlier, and she said that the figure's more like eight grand.
Yeah, I've never seen that million dollar figure verified.
I think it's sort of a number that just gets thrown around.
And I think some people are okay with that being out there, but I don't think it's proven.
So yeah, I don't know what the exact dollar amount is, but the Bundies have the right to graze on the BLM land.
They've established that right through grazing for generations and through the use of the water.
That being said, yes, there are grazing fees that need to be paid for any rancher that grazes on BLM or for forest service land.
So, I mean, that is one step in the process, yes.
So the bungees were wrong not to pay, or did they, I heard they wanted to pay and they weren't allowed to pay?
Right, I understand they tried to pay their county.
They don't believe in paying the BLM because they don't believe that the federal land, that the federal government should actually own huge tracts of land according to the Constitution.
And that might be another topic for another day for you to cover.
But yeah, so they did decline to pay the BLM for their grazing fees.
That is correct.
But I do believe that they attempted to pay that to the county because they believe more in local control of land like we were talking about versus somebody in Washington, D.C. And you have to understand, you know, 50 of their neighbors, really their only neighbors that they had, the Bundies were the 51st rancher kind of left there when they declared this tortoise endangered and said that, you know, cattle were going to kill all the tortoises, so they had to get rid of all the cattle.
And so the Bundies really had their backs up against a wall and were really just clawing to preserve anything that they had left as far as their ranch goes.
Right, it wasn't about the grass bill.
It was about preserving their ranch forever.
Now, we have, that brings us to our last guy, Lavoy Finnecum.
He outright refused.
And instead, like these guys, they don't go to a debtor's prison for a week the way you would if you owed someone some money.
The Hammonds spent five years in prison.
I think they're still in prison, right?
Yes, that is correct.
And the Bundies are still facing prison time.
And this Lavoie guy ends up shot dead.
Right, right.
It seems like the punishment is not fitting the crime.
Yeah.
It really seems like overkill and kind of a double standard when you look at how so many other things are handled.
Yeah, other crimes are handled.
Well, we just had an illegal immigrant shoot a woman in the head and get away scot-free.
Right, right, I know.
It doesn't seem...
He was the most gentle, kind man that ever lived.
I mean, if that's something that is worth shooting somebody over, then I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, it's nice to finally get the other side because we're getting a very biased look at ranching and no one's talking to the ranchers.
Well, we really appreciate you showing an interest here because we feel the same way.
We really feel like the ranchers need to get their point of view out there because it's, you know, we feel like we're doing a service to the world.
We're providing food.
Like I told you in my email, we're taking a natural resource, a natural renewable resource, grass, that really nothing else can be done with that.
And we're turning it into food that people can eat.
And we're doing it on very slim profit margins.
We're not getting rich.
We do it because we love it and we feel like we don't tell the rest of the world how they need to do their jobs.
And we'd appreciate somewhat of the same kind of sentiment toward us.
Just, you know, let us do what we know how to do.
I'd appreciate if you could get some respect too.
Carrie, thank you for coming on the show.
It's a pleasure to talk to you and I want to check in later.
Thank you very much.
We would love that.
We appreciate having the chance to visit with you.
All right, Kerry, cheers.
Sipping whiskey out the bar.
Not thinking about tomorrow.
Ryan, are you there, sir?
I am here.
So I'm conflating a lot of stuff today with Trump's move to sort of defederalize these monuments in, I don't know, Utah, Ohio.
I'm a Canadian New Yorker born in Britain, so I couldn't know less about this subject.
But is it crazy of me to say that what Trump did is associated with the Hammonds, is associated with Lavoie Finnecum, is associated with the Bundies, in that the less government has involvement with land, the better we all are?
I wish I had a solid answer to tell you.
Yes, definitively, he did it for them.
I can't tell you that, though.
The moves that he made earlier this week when he was visiting Salt Lake City were probably the biggest single step back towards Federalism that I've seen within at least the last 25 years.
I mean, I had just moved to southern Utah when the Grand Staircase Escalante Monument was designated by William Jefferson Clinton.
And I remember the anger and just the outrage that locals there felt to have so many acres placed off limits and essentially regulated out of existence.
I know the common narrative is, well, this is to protect the land.
This is to make sure that it's preserved.
But there were a lot of people who were utilizing that land, and I mean responsibly, forestry and ranching and so forth, mining.
This wasn't scorched earth or strip mining.
These were people who had it in their interest to keep those renewable resources lasting for generations.
And suddenly it was placed off limits.
Well, there's all this conjecture.
The left loves dealing in hypotheticals.
And I haven't heard anyone say it's all going to be shopping malls now.
But there is fear of fracking or something.
And whenever they say that, I can't help but ask, what's the matter with fracking?
Yeah.
And I'm not an engineer, so I couldn't tell you, is fracking really causing earthquakes?
Is it causing the earth to shift poles?
Or I don't know.
I've heard some pretty outrageous theories of what it does.
Having lived in the West all of my life, I am a very strong proponent for the wise use of resources.
And I trust the people who live there in those lands and in those states and affected areas to understand what wise use is.
Nobody wants to have to wade through spilled crude oil holding a sheaf of money in their hands.
Look, we got money.
We may be dying, but at least we're rich.
We're literally hillbillies.
Yes.
Right.
No, we want to take care of this.
And especially the national parks and the national monuments in Utah, they're a source of pride.
We love when people come here and just go gaga over our eye candy.
Right.
Brian, can you move your mic a bit?
When it's behind you, you look like a pirate.
It looks like an eye patch.
There we go.
That's good.
There we go.
Okay.
Just don't hide your gorgeous face.
Gorgeous guys like us.
We need to advertise.
We want people to go gaga over our eye candy.
But I think that the conflation here is justified, I hope, in that the Bundies basically said this.
They said, we don't want the federal government controlling our land.
We can do a better job with it.
And isn't the whole origin of the Bundy affair that Cliven said, I don't recognize the Bureau of Land Management.
I'm not paying you.
I'll pay the county, but I'm not paying the Washington.
I'm not paying the White House for the right to do what I've been doing for generations.
That's a very big part of it.
You have to understand that the Bundy family's roots go back to about 1877 on that land where they have been running their cattle.
And I don't know if you have ever seen the Gold Butte area or the Bunkerville area of Nevada.
Have you ever seen pictures of it?
Yes.
What was your impression?
It doesn't look like it's easy to farm.
You're not going to grow any soya beans there.
No, it's a pretty harsh environment.
I mean, the kind of people who would settle there and eke out a living ranching and tame that land, they got to be pretty determined people.
And so it's been in their family for generations.
Have you seen how many kids these people have?
Well, you need help on the ranch.
I talked to Angie Bundy this morning.
She's got eight.
Eight running around.
I wish we all did that these days.
Yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but yeah, this land, all it is, is just some tufts of grass and bushes and stuff, and that's useless.
You're not going to make lumber out of that, but you can make beef out of it.
And we have this mentality where we trust the White House with nature more than the ranchers.
And I think it's a form of self-hatred.
Like, we hate the cowboy.
Whereas when I was a kid, it was Jesse James and Cowboys and Indians.
No one wanted to be an Indian.
I bet you today, no kids want to be cowboys, if they're even allowed to play that game.
Yeah, cowboys have kind of become the new symbol of defiance.
You know, a cowboy hat and cowboy boots.
What are you against?
And it's just because they're the ones who are standing up for their rights and for these lands.
And maybe I could explain for a second how these rights tie together.
When you hear of grazing rights or water rights or improvements, you know, like water tanks and ponds and things, those are some of the rights that the Bundies were asserting.
This is why Clivin said, I'm going to stop doing business with the BLM because they're trying to put me out of business.
And he had made beneficial use, as had his forebears before him, of the grass that grew there, the water that flowed there.
They had made beneficial use of that, which gave them rights, even though they don't own title to the land, they still have an enforceable right to those things which they have properly purchased and have been recorded in the county recorder's office.
And by using those rights, they still have access to them.
It's like having an easement.
If you've had property where there was an easement, you may own the property, but that easement stays in place because it was a pre-existing right.
Right.
Well, that's something I think a lot of us New Yorkers don't understand is the Bundies weren't being inconvenienced.
It's not like they saw their bill and went, it's a little high this month.
They were facing extinction.
The Hamlets, they weren't mildly annoyed by how they had to do brush fires.
They are serving five years in prison.
So it's not like the government is being a little grumpy or a little inconvenient.
They are decimating families that are generations old.
Out of 52 ranchers that were operating in that area of Clark County, Nevada, Clive and Bundy is the only rancher who remains in business.
The rest were regulated out of existence.
Where's the support?
Like even, I know this is going to sound crazy, but even Antifa, even these young kids that call themselves anarchists, aren't you inspired by seeing a man with a gun stand up to the authorities?
That's a beautiful American archetype.
Something that I wish more people understood, too, about Cliven's conflict with the authorities is this has gone on for well over 20 years.
Yeah, same with the Hammonds.
And it has been determination, not violence, and not even the threat of violence, that has stopped the authorities from taking their cattle away from them.
What's happened, though, is the authorities have ratcheted up the coercion and ratcheted up the arm twisting to try to get the Bundies to bow to their will.
And I think we're at a point in our history here in America where it's been long enough since someone really had to stand up and take a hit for liberty or for asserting their rights.
We've forgotten what that is.
I think we assume, oh, it's just going to naturally hand down from generation to generation, and it doesn't work that way.
There are always forces that are competing against liberty and trying to shrink it and expand the state in place of it.
And when someone does stand up, they will get hammered, just as the Hammonds have and just as the Bundies have.
Well, and also there's a real out of sight, out of mind, and a kind of an apathy you get from the rest of America.
I don't totally get why.
I think maybe it's going to Marxist schools and hearing the cowboys are terrible, but they just sort of shrug it off.
Well, they shouldn't have broken the law.
They should have paid their bills.
What exactly are the Bundies facing?
I heard that they just got out on bail.
What's an update with the prison term?
Okay, so as of last week, actually, I guess as of this week, just earlier this week, all of the defendants in this case, stemming from a standoff and confrontation that took place in April of 2014, all of the defendants have been granted pretrial release.
Now, this is after 660 days of sitting in jail waiting for trial.
So, I mean, if anybody's tempted to say, well, that's so generous.
And wow, how nice.
Hey, these guys have been in jail for the better part of two years.
Cliven has chosen to refuse that pretrial release.
And it's because of his principles.
He's saying, look, I'm not going to be let out of here so I can go home and be a dog on a leash, you know, with an electric monitor here.
He says, I will walk out of this jail a free man or I'm not walking out.
Amazing.
I hear nothing but heroicism, and I get nothing but apathy and disdain from my fellow city folk.
It's incredibly frustrating, and it's un-American, ultimately.
Well, there's the narrative that has to be overcome.
And the very fact that these individuals were given pretrial release is a strong indicator that that narrative is starting to fracture.
The prosecution portrayed these, well, these are dangerous men.
Why?
They pointed guns at federal agents and they incited violence.
And yet, as evidence has come forward, there's this pattern emerging.
The government, so far in this trial, has put three witnesses on the stand.
Every one of these witnesses has inadvertently revealed previously withheld information that actually helped the defense.
And the judge has sealed these sessions where she's made the decision to give these guys pretrial release, but it's a pretty safe bet.
Some of this evidence that's been coming forward in those sealed sessions is what has caused her to reverse that earlier hard stance that said, no, these guys are too dangerous to be let loose.
So how much prison time are they facing?
Worst case scenario?
Decades.
It'll be a life sentence for many of them if they were convicted.
And what does your gut say the conviction will be?
The jury is paying really close attention.
I've watched them and I've watched the notes that they take.
And when they have the chance to ask questions of the witnesses, their questions are pointed more at the government's case.
Why did you do things this way?
Or is it normal for you to do things like this?
Now, keep in mind, we're still early in the trial, but these guys, their BS detectors seem to be well calibrated.
Well, I'm optimistic, but I'm also looking at the Hammonds who got five years for lighting a brush fire that they had to light to ensure their land lived.
Yeah.
Well, and isn't it interesting?
The first judge in that case felt terrible about the idea of sentencing them to that length of prison.
And in fact, said, no, I'm going to let you serve this much time or this much for time served.
And it was another judge that said, no, no, no, you have to serve every day of it, which is what sparked the protest, you know, up at Mal here in the first place.
And ultimately got Lavoy Finnecum killed.
Yeah.
Terrible.
Well, Brian, thanks for updating us, and we'd like to check back in because I don't enjoy this out of sight, out of mind we're seeing from the people who provide us with our cheeseburgers.
We need these guys.
If you would have a chance to meet the Bundies, you know, their name sparks really strong reactions in people either way.
But I can tell you from long time association with Ryan Bundy, I've been a friend of his for about 12 years.
These are the kind of people, if you were broken down alongside the road, they would stop and not just wish you well.
Well, we'll say a prayer for you and then drive off.
They would take care of you and do whatever it took to get you on your way.
If it meant giving you the shirt off their backs, that's the kind of people that they are.
And I wish more people understood that.
Well, I'll tell you what, I don't doubt that for a second.
You can just sort of tell.
Brian, we got to go.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
And don't eat all those pieces at once.
That's going to be murder on you.
The cheese is just going to clog you right up.
See you next time.
Thanks, Gavin.
We're smoking funny things Making love out by the lake To our favorite song Mmm Mmm They took a bunch of shrubs, excuse me, and they turned them into the greatest million earthquakes.
I can feel endorphins being released with each bite.
I think that's God's way of saying you're doing the right thing.
But no, they're not heroes.
Men who stand up to the entire government, the entire federal government, armed men who stand face to face against a man.
They're not heroes.
Well, who do you got?
We got these guys.
They're heroes because they put on wigs.
And after hundreds of hours of playing video games where they chose the chick, I don't know, because she kicks better, they started thinking, maybe I am a chick.
No, you're a degenerate nerd desperately hunting for some sort of color to give you some sort of depth, some sort of culture.
And the culture, of course, is just mental illness and weakness.
And that's why we have to stand by these guys.
You know what?
Tomorrow I'm going to get Terry Shappard on the show, Green Beret, medic, marksman.
And I'm going to have Miles threaten him with these people and hear Terry's response and why this has to be stopped.
And then similarly, I think I'm going to talk to a roaming millennial who I would say is a nine.
I'm going to talk to a roaming millennial about women in the workforce and how many exactly belong to be there and why the vast majority ultimately do not.
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